MODERN  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 


JOHN   MILTON. 


MODERN  ENGLISH 
LITERATURE 

FROM   CHAUCER  TO  THE 
PRESENT  DAY 


BY 


G.  H.  MAIR 


AUTHOR  OF  "ENGLISH  LITERATURE:  MODERN 
(Home  University  Library) 


WITH    PORTRAITS 


NEW  YORK 

HENRY    HOLT    AND    COMPANY 

LONDON :  WILLIAMS  &  NORGATE 

1914 


9/2- 
z, 

hi 


PREFACE 

THIS  book  is  an  expansion  of  the  volume  on 
"  Modern  English  Literature  "  which  I  wrote  two 
years  ago  for  the  Home  University  Library.  A 
considerable  number  of  additions  and  corrections 
have  been  made,  and  authors  have  been  dealt  with 
whom  it  was  impossible  to  include  in  the  smaller 
book.  Particularly  the  study  of  modern  English 
literature  has  been  taken  back  to  Chaucer,  with 
whom  it  may  be  said  strictly  to  begin,  so  that  the 
book  now  covers  more  or  less  the  whole  range  of 
those  English  authors  whose  work  can  be  read 
without  the  intervention  of  the  philologist  or  the 
professor  of  dead  dialects.  Its  plan,  however, 
remains  the  same,  that  is  to  say,  it  aims  at 
maintaining  an  individual  point  of  view,  at  laying 
stress  on  ideas  and  tendencies  rather  than  at 
recording  facts  and  events,  and  it  does  not  hesitate 
to  draw  generously  on  standard  works  of  criticism 
and  biography  with  which  students  are  familiar. 
I  believe  most  of  my  debts  are  acknowledged ;  for 
any  which  are  not  I  crave  pardon.  The  portraits 
which  accompany  the  text  have  been  carefully 
chosen  and  are  believed  to  be  the  most  character- 
istic in  each  case  of  the  authors  whom  they 
represent. 

G.  H.  M. 


TO 
MY   FATHER  AND   MOTHER 


CONTENTS 


CHAP.  PAGE 

1.  FROM  CHAUCER  TO  MORE       ....  1 

2.  ELIZABETHAN  POETRY  AND  PROSE      .         .  35 

3.  THE  DRAMA 71 

4.  THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY        .         .         .  107 

5.  THE  AGE  OF  GOOD  SENSE       ....  142 

6.  DR  JOHNSON  AND  HIS  TIME  .         .        .         .172 

7.  THE  ROMANTIC  REVIVAL         ....  204 

8.  THE  VICTORIAN  AGE 235 

9.  THE  NOVEL 260 

10.  CONTEMPORARIES  292 


vii 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 


John  Milton    .... 

Edmund  Spenser    . 

William  Shakespeare 

Benjamin  Jonson     . 

John  Donne    . 

Alexander  Pope 

Jonathan  Swift 

Dr  Samuel  Johnson 

William  Wordsworth 

Percy  Bysshe  Shelley 

Charles  Lamb 

Alfred  Lord  Tennyson    . 

Algernon  Charles  Swinburne  . 

Thomas  Carlyle 

Henry  Fielding 

George  Meredith    . 


.   Frontispiece 

.  To  face  page  54 

98 

120 

122 

146 

„  166 
176 
220 
228 
234 
242 
252 
260 
274 
284 


ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

CHAPTER  I 

FROM    CHAUCER   TO    MORE 

(1) 

IT  used  to  be  the  habit  of  historians  of  English 
literature  and,  still  more,  of  English  poetry,  to 
describe  Geoffrey  Chaucer  as  the  father  of  English 
verse.  The  title  has  fallen  out  of  repute  since 
scholarship  carried  the  history  of  English  literature 
backwards,  through  his  predecessors  in  what  is 
called  middle  English,  to  the  authors  of  the  old 
English  epic  and  elegiac  poems,  but  in  its  essence 
the  title  and  the  idea  which  lay  behind  it  were 
both  sound.  His  successors  owe  more  to  Chaucer 
than  he  owed  to  the  Englishmen  at  any  rate,  who 
went  before  him.  The  great  outburst  of  poetic 
genius  which  took  place  when  the  Renaissance 
reached  England  and  afterwards,  owed  more  to 
him  than  to  any  foreign  originator.  The  work 
of  such  poets  as  Surrey  and  Wyatt  and  Spenser 
derived  most  of  its  distinctive  qualities  from  what 
it  had  learned  out  of  his  work.  He  gave  words 
and  phrases  to  them,  plots  to  Shakespeare,  inspira- 


ENGLISH   LITERATURE 


::tiori  to  :M'iTton,  and  material  for  the  modernising 
activities  of  Dryden  and  Pope  and  Wordsworth. 
For  the  scholars  our  literature  may  begin  earlier ; 
for  the  poets  it  began  with  him,  and  if  we  go 
no  further  back,  though  we  may  miss  something 
which  is  interesting  in  itself,  we  shall  certainly  lose 
nothing  which  affects  what  is  to  come  afterwards. 

Old  English  poetry,  for  all  its  gravity  and 
beauty  and  its  atmosphere  charged  with  the  life 
of  the  sea-roving  tribes  who  colonised  our  islands, 
is  written  in  a  language  as  distinct  from  that  of 
modern  English  as  German  is  at  the  present  day. 
Middle  English  poetry,  that  is  to  say  the  poetry 

•  of  the  two  hundred  years  preceding  Chaucer, 
has  little  literary  merit,  is  always  rude,  some- 

t  times  unrhythmical,  and  never  more  than  baldly 
narrative.  Moreover,  though  it  approaches  in- 
finitely more  nearly  to  modern  speech  than  poetry 
written  before  the  Conquest,  it  is  not  possible  to 
read  it  without  the  help  of  a  dictionary;  and 
though  a  complete  study  of  English  literature 
could  not  fail  to  take  it  into  account,  it  is  not 
modern  in  the  sense  in  which  the  word  is  used  in 
this  book,  because  it  bears  no  direct  relation  to 
what  comes  after  it.  Chaucer  owed  little  to  it. 
When  he  drew  from  his  predecessors — which  he 
did  largely,  being,  like  all  great  authors,  not  afraid 
of  plagiarism, — he  went  to  Italy  and  France.  He 
brought,  therefore,  into  English  literature  that 
factor  which  has  constantly  operated  since  his 


FROM   CHAUCER   TO   MORE  3 

day,  namely  the  close  relation,  sometimes  acting 
one  way,  sometimes  another,  between  writing  in 
our  country  and  writing  in  the  Continent.  And 
for  all  the  obsolete  words  which  his  poems  con- 
tain, he  wrote  in  modern  English  and  he  sang 
in  modern  metres.  There  is  a  wider  difference 
between  The  Canterbury  Tales  and  the  Vision  of 
Piers  Plowman,  which  is  nearly  contemporary 
with  them,  than  there  is  between  the  Tales  and 
the  Faerie  Queen.  Langland  is  the  end  of  an 
old  order,  Chaucer  the  beginning  of  the  new. 

It  would  be  almost  impossible  to  exaggerate 
the  extent  of  the  innovation  which  Chaucer  made 
in  the  use  of  the  English  language  for  literary 
purposes.  He  is  the  creator  of  English  poetry, 
or  at  least  of  English  poetic  forms.  All  his 
metres  except  one — the  eight-syllable  verse,  which 
was  already  in  use,  and  has  persisted  as  one  of 
the  modes  of  English  poetry — he  had  to  make 
for  himself.  Under  the  influence  of  French  and 
afterwards  Italian  poetry,  he  produced  the  ten- 
syllable  verse,  which  has  been  the  chosen  metre 
of  English  poetry  since  his  day :  either  rhymed, 
as  in  the  heroic  couplet,  or  in  stanzas,  as  used 
by  Spenser  and  by  the  romantic  poets  of  a  later 
day,  or  unrhymed,  as  in  blank  verse,  which  was 
devised  by  the  earlier  poets  of  the  English 
Renaissance  on  the  basis  of  his  metre.  He  intro- 
duced the  seven-line  stanza,  which  has  been  largely 
used  for  narrative  poetry  ever  since.  He  was  the 


4  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

first  Englishman  to  experiment  in  the  sonnet,  and 
he  used  quite  naturally  the  forms  of  the  ballade  and 
the  rondeau,  which,  in  spite  of  what  he  wrote  in 
them,  did  not  become  completely  naturalised  in 
English  poetry  till  fifty  years  ago. 

But  his  greatest  achievement,  that  which  had 
most  moment  for  the  future,  was  that  he  set 
English  on  its  feet  as  the  literary  language  of 
this  country,  and  particularly  that  dialect  of 
English  spoken  in  London  and  the  counties  to 
the  north  of  it,  roughly  between  London  and 
Birmingham,  the  dialect  with  which  he  and  every- 
one moving  round  the  Court  was  most  familiar. 
Chaucer's  English,  which  was  "the  King's  English" 
(the  phrase  still  persists),  became,  from  the  language 
of  English  writers,  gradually  the  spoken  language 
of  the  whole  country.  Even  in  his  day,  when  the 
law-courts  were  beginning  to  use  it,  the  fortunes 
of  literary  English  were  still  uncertain.  His  con- 
temporary, Gower,  typified  this  uncertainty  by 
writing  three  poems,  of  which  one  was  in  French, 
one  in  Latin,  and  one  in  English.  In  Scotland, 
where  the  knowledge  of  Latin  was  more  general, 
it  was  used  habitually  by  educated  people,  and 
was  even  more  familiar  to  them  than  the  verna- 
cular ;  so  that  Chaucer,  in  using  English,  was  adopt- 
ing an  attitude  the  novelty  of  which  it  is  hardly 
possible  to  appreciate  properly  at  the  present  day. 
He  deliberately  chose  the  common  tongue  because 
it  was  really  living,  and  because  it  had  spread  up 


FROM   CHAUCER   TO   MORE  5 

to  the  higher  classes  of  the  people  ;  but  he  resolved 
at  the  same  time  to  endow  it  with  all  the  grace 
and  refinement  which  instinct  and  knowledge 
enabled  him  to  appreciate  in  French  poetry ;  and 
if  we  grant  him  in  this  a  clearer  vision  of  his  aims 
than  he  really  had,  we  cannot  overrate  the  conse- 
quences of  his  choice.  By  throwing  the  weight 
of  his  genius  into  the  balance  against  French, 
he  decided  the  future ;  by  importing  all  the 
excellences  and  graces  of  French  verse  into 
poems  written  in  the  particular  English  of  his 
district,  he  severed  himself  from  the  literary  past 
of  English  writing  and  founded  the  modern 
literary  language  of  the  nation ;  and  because  he 
did  so,  he  is  the  real  father  of  English  poetry. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  linger  over  the  chronology 
of  Chaucer's  work.  Bis  earliest  things  seem  to 
have  been  the  product  solely  of  French  influence, 
and  he  seems  to  have  begun  with  lyric  poetry, 
making  known  to  England  the  new  forms — ballade, 
rondeau,  and  so  on — which  had  just  been  made 
popular  in  France.  At  the  beginning,  indeed,  his 
mind  seems  to  have  been  French  in  its  outlook, 
and,  if  style  alone  be  considered,  no  trace  of  the 
Anglo-Saxon  literary  past  of  the  country  persists 
in  its  verse.  The  light  touch  which  pervades  it  is  * 
precisely  the  same  as  that  of  the  best  of  its  French 
contemporaries.  There  is  in  it  a  sense  of  the  mere 
joyousness  of  living,  which  comes  out  in  his  fond- 
ness for  sunlight  and  springtime  and  the  flowers 


6  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

and  birds  of  May,  and  everything  that  he  tells,  he 
tells  in  an  even  voice,  pitched  so  that  he  can  relate 
without  fatigue  or  failing  a  long  and  leisurely 
moving  story — the  voice  of  the  poets  of  con- 
temporary France.  He  has,  too,  the  charm  of 
that  easy  French  simplicity  which  comes  from  a 
perfect  correspondence  of  words  which  are  neither 
difficult  nor  difficultly  used,  with  thought  that  is 
always  equable  and  never  deep. 

"  A  thousand  tymes  have  I  herd  men  telle, 
That  ther  is  j  oye  in  heven  and  peyne  in  helle ; 
And  I  accorde  wel  that  hit  is  so ; 
But  natheles,  yit  wot  I  wel  also, 
That  ther  nis  noon  dwelling  in  this  contree. 
That  either  hath  in  heven  or  helle  y-be, 
Ne  may  of  hit  non  other  weyes  witen 
But  as  he  hath  herd  seyd,  or  founde  it  writen." 

It  was  his  training  in  the  precise  and  difficult 
forms  of  French  artificial  verse  which  gave  him 
his  ease  and  mastery  in  his  later  narrative  poetry. 
Many  of  his  early  ballades  are  no  doubt  lost  to  us, 
but  the  fruit  of  them  remains  in  the  direct  and 
brilliant  compression  with  which  in  one  or  two 
stanzas  of  a  poem  like  Troilus  or  The  Prioress's 
Tale  he  can  set  a  situation  of  a  picture  before  the 
mind  of  his  readers.  His  earlier  narrative  poems 
were  written  while  he  was  still  subjecting  himself 
to  this  training,  and  they  show  the  effect  of  it 
very  little,  being  done  on  the  model  which  was  so 
popular  in  his  day,  that  of  the  Romance  of  the 
Rose,  and  showing  little  sign  of  the  originality  in 


FROM   CHAUCER  TO    MORE  7 

handling  his  material  which  he  was  afterwards  to 
achieve.  Such  work  is  to  be  found  in  The  Death 
of  Blanche  the  Duchess,  The  House  of  Fame,  The  \/ 
Parliament  of  Fowls,  and  The  Legend  of  Good 
Women.  All  these  are  allegorical,  and  they  are 
overweighted  with  learning  of  the  mediaeval  kind  ; v 
for  though  Chaucer  was  contemporary  with  and 
had  probably  met  Petrarch,  he  still  looked  at  Rome 
through  the  eyes  of  a  troubadour  and  not  of  a 
humanist.  One  of  them,  The  House  of  Fame, 
contains  almost  as  much  autobiography  as  is  to  be 
found  in  the  Canterbury  Tales,  passages  in  which 
he  gives  us  a  kind  of  picture  of  his  daily  life,  of  the 
books  he  read,  and  of  the  character  and  turn  of 
his  mind. 

"...  thou  hast  no  tydinges 

Of  Loves  folk,  if  they  be  glade, 

Ne  of  noght  elles  that  god  made ; 

And  noght  only  fro  fer  contree 

That  ther  no  tyding  comth  to  thee, 

But  of  thy  verray  neyghebores, 

That  dwellen  almost  at  thy  dores, 

Thou  herest  neither  that  ne  this ; 

For  whan  thy  labour  doon  al  is, 

And  hast  y-maad  thy  rekeninges, 

In  stede  of  reste  and  newe  thinges, 

Thou  gost  hoom  to  thy  hous  anoon ; 

And,  also  domb  as  any  stoon, 

Thou  sittest  at  another  boke, 

Til  fully  daswed  is  thy  loke, 

And  livest  thus  as  an  hermyte 

Although  thyn  abstinence  is  lyte." 

Had  Chaucer  died  at  the  age  of  forty,  he  would 


8  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

have  had  a  reputation  something  similar  to  that  of 
his  contemporary  Gower ;  that  is  to  say,  we  would 
have  had  to  look  upon  him  as  a  man  with  a  light 
and  easy  turn  for  versifying,  a  remarkable  faculty 
for  transferring  the  smoothness  and  gracefulness 
of  French  into  his  own  tongue,  but  not  a  great 
artist,  although  of  course  one  who  would  have 
been  historically  important.  That  he  is  so  much 
more  than  this  is  due  to  a  fresh  source  of  inspira- 
tion which  came  to  him  at  that  age,  opened  up  to 
him  a  new  literature  and  new  ways  of  thinking, 
and  stimulated  the  development  of  his  mind  in  a 
new  and  original  direction.  Some  time  shortly 
after  he  was  thirty  he  visited  Italy,  and  in  the 
ten  years  which  followed  he  must  have  made  him- 
self familiar  with  Italian  letters.  We  know  that 
he  had  read  Dante,  and  that  he  understood  the 
greatness  of  Petrarch,  though,  judging  from  their 
works,  one  would  say  that  there  was  little  intel- 
lectually in  common  between  the  two  men. 
Boccaccio  he  must  have  heard  about,  and  it  is  one 
of  the  unsolved  puzzles  of  Chaucerian  scholarship 
that  there  should  be  no  mention  of  him  in 
Chaucer's  works.  Where  we  know  that  Boccaccio 
must  be  referred  to  we  find  the  mysterious  name 
"  Lollius,"  which  has  not  been  found  anywhere 
else;  and  though  Troilus  and  Cressida  is  based 
on  a  poem  of  the  Italian,  Chaucer  oddly  enough 
does  not  seem  to  have  known  of  the  Decameron, 
an  even  more  amazing  circumstance  when  it  is 


FROM   CHAUCER   TO   MORE  9 

considered  that  the  scheme  of  the  Canterbury 
Tales  is  in  a  way  related  to  that  of  Boccaccio's 
great  book.  At  any  rate,  he  got  two  great  things 
from  him.  One  was  Troilus  and  Cressida,  and 
the  other  was  The  Knight's  Tale,  the  former  of 
them  certainly  the  greatest  narrative  poem  in 
modern  English  even  as  it  is  the  earliest.  To 
read  it  is  to  realise  afresh  that  at  its  highest 
moments  there  is  no  such  thing  as  "  progress " 
in  literature ;  perfection  reached  as  surely  by  a 
master  in  the  fourteenth  century  as  in  the  seven- 
teenth or  the  nineteenth,  or  as  it  was  five  hundred 
years  before  the  first. 

In  spite  of  the  greatness  of  the  Troilus,  however, 
it  is  not  by  it  mainly  that  he  has  been  remembered 
by  those  who  have  come  after  him.  What  the 
impulse  was  which  set  Chaucer  about  compiling 
the  Canterbury  Tales  we  do  not  know,  and  we 
can  hardly  safely  guess.  It  is  unlikely  that  he  had  \  / 
read  the  Decameron,  and  at  any  rate  the  scheme 
of  the  Canterbury  pilgrimage  bears  none  but  the 
most  superficial  resemblance  to  the  precise  and 
artificial  form  of  Boccaccio.  All  the  speakers  in 
his  book  belong  to  the  same  rank  of  society,  and 
there  is  no  reason  why  one  should  be  distinguished 
from  another ;  they  all  possess  the  same  even 
elegance  of  speech,  whether  the  tale  be  comic  or 
tragic,  shocking  or  romantic.  The  variety  of  the 
subject-matter  in  his  stories  is  almost  as  great  as 
their  number,  but  there  is  no  variety  in  the  manner 


10  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  telling  them,  and  probably  not  the  closest  or 
most  familiar  student  of  the  book  could  name  the 
narrator  of  even  the  best  known  of  them.  In 
the  Canterbury  Tales,  on  the  other  hand,  the 
scheme  of  a  number  of  stories  related  by  different 
persons  is  approached  from  the  other  end.  Boc- 
caccio cared  much  for  his  stories  and  little  for  the 
lords  and  ladies  of  Florence  who  tell  them. 
Chaucer's  first  and  last  interest  was  with  his 
pilgrims  and  not  with  his  tales.  When  his  interest 
flagged  or  became  indolent,  he  had  no  hesitation  in 
simply  using  up  whatever  material  he  had  ready 
to  his  hand  and  putting  it  as  a  story  into  the 
mouth  of  one  of  his  characters.  Many  of  the 
tales  are  certainly  older  than  the  scheme  into 
which  they  are  put,  and  indeed  it  would  be  possible 
to  argue  that  the  author  devised  that  scheme  as  a 
means  for  giving  interest  and  a  certain  continuity 
to  things  which  he  had  already  written  but  which 
were  not  in  circulation. 

Whatever  the  impulse  or  reason  may  have  been, 
he  turned  suddenly  aside  at  the  age  of  fifty  from 
the  path  of  poetry  which  up  to  then  he  had  been 
following  and  founded  a  new  type  of  writing, 
that  concerned  with  the  observation  and  deline- 
ation of  character  which  in  one  form  or  another, 
whether  as  the  drama  or  the  novel,  has  been  the 
chief  and  peculiar  characteristic  of  English  litera- 
ture since. 

A  study  of  a  book  so  large  and  various  is  outside 


FROM   CHAUCER   TO    MORE  11 

the  scope  of  an  essay  of  this  kind,  but  it  is  worth 
while  observing  before  we  leave  it,  how  closely  the 
scheme  of  the  Canterbury  Tales  approaches  that 
of  the  later  novel  of  adventure.  Had  Chaucer's 
dealings  with  his  characters  stopped  with  the  pro- 
logue, he  would  have  given  us  a  masterly  piece  of 
observation  of  contemporary  social  J^es^jwhich 
has  no  parallel  in  any  other  country,  and  which 
includes,  except  royalty  and  nobles  on  the  one 
hand  and  the  lowest  vagrants  on  the  other,  practi- 
cally the  whole  English  nation  ;  but  he  would  have 
been  a  long  way  behind  the  novel,  because  he 
would  have  given  us  little  about  the  relations 
between  the  people  whom  he  painted  so  well. 
But  Chaucer's  handling  of  his  characters  was  not 
limited  to  these  truthful  and  delicate  descriptions. 
He  does  not  pass  abruptly  from  the  portrait  to  the 
tale.  "  In  the  course  of  their  ride  he  makes  the 
pilgrims  converse  among  themselves ;  he  shows 
them  calling  out  to  each  other,  approving  what 
one  has  said  and  more  often  still  rating  each  other. 
They  give  their  opinions  on  the  stories  that  have 
been  told,  and  these  comments  reveal  their  domi- 
nant thought,  their  feelings,  and  the  objects  of 
their  interest.  A  sort  of  comedy  is  being  enacted 
through  the  poem  which  binds  together  the  various 
parts.  It  is  only  just  outlined,  it  is  true,  but  it 
suffices  to  show  the  intentions  and  comic  powers 
of  the  author.  The  gentle  knight  soothes  the 
angry  ones  with  grave  and  courteous  words. 


12  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Some  pilgrims,  whose  natures  or  occupations  place 
them  at  enmity,  exchange  high  words  and  nearly 
come  to  blows.  The  sturdy  Miller  and  the  slender 
Reve  rail  at  each  other  ;  the  Friar  quarrels  with  the 
Somnour.  First  the  Miller  and  then  the  Cook  get 
drunk.  The  Pardoner  and  the  Wife  of  Bath  each 
deliver  interminable  discourses  before  coming  to 
their  stories.  The  prologues  and  epilogues  con- 
stantly bring  back  the  attention  from  the  tales  to 
the  pilgrims,  who  narrate  them  or  listen  to  them. 
In  this  way  the  characters  who  were  first  described 
by  the  poet  reveal  themselves  yet  again  by  their 
words  and  actions." l  The  Canterbury  Tales,  that  is 
to  say,  are  on  the  way  towards  a  novel  of  the  type 
of  the  Pickwick  Papers,  the  kind  of  novel  in  which 
a  series  of  sharply  defined  characters  pass  through 
amusing  or  exciting  adventures,  commonly  strung 
on  a  journey  as  the  connecting  thread.  In  the 
nineteenth-century  book  some  of  the  characters 
tell  stories  even  as  they  do  in  the  Canterbury  Tales, 
but  the  stories  have  ceased  to  be  the  main  thing. 
Chaucer,  on  the  other  hand,  though  he  went  far, 
hardly  went  so  far  as  involving  the  pilgrims  in  a 
plot  of  their  own.  But  for  all  that,  the  resem- 
blances between  the  two  are  greater  than  the 
differences,  and  across  nearly  five  centuries  Chaucer 
and  Dickens  join  hands. 

1  Chaucer,  by  Professor  Legouis,  a  book  to  which  I  am  indebted 
for  many  of  the  opinions  expressed  in  this  chapter. 


FROM  CHAUCER  TO   MORE  13 

(2) 

Of  Chaucer's  contemporaries  and  immediate 
successors  in  England  little  need  be  said.  The 
greater  of  his  two  contemporaries,  William  Lang- 
land,  author  of  the  Vision  of  Piers  Plowman,  was  a 
solitary  genius,  writing  in  an  old-fashioned  metre, 
the  last  of  the  old  English,  having  no  relation  to 
what  came  after  him.  With  the  other  of  them, 
John  Gower,  the  case  is  different.  For  all  the 
medisevalism  of  his  subjects  and  the  sources  from 
which  he  drew  them,  he  remains  an  essentially 
modern  writer — always  metrical  and  smooth  and 
graceful,  but  lacking  in  definiteness  and  strength, 
and,  above  all,  wanting  in  compression  and  in  the 
dramatic  gift  of  telling  a  story  with  terseness  and 
point.  His  work  belongs  to  that  type  of  literature 
of  which  examples  are  to  be  found  in  minor  Eliza- 
bethan sonnet-writing  and,  later,  pre-eminently, 
in  the  work  of  the  lesser  eighteenth-century  poets, 
in  which  the  qualities  of  ease  and  fluency  and 
grace  are  caught  from  greater  work  near  it,  but  in 
which  nothing  is  achieved  beyond  urbanity  and 
smoothness,  which  gives  nothing  to  the  intellect 
of  the  reader  and  asks  no  service  of  it  in  return. 
Gower  was  a  man  of  literary  capacity  without 
genius ;  Langland  had  genius  without  much 
literary  capacity ;  Chaucer  had  both,  and  there- 
fore what  he  did  lives  at  the  expense  of  the  other 
two.  Yet  it  would  be  a  mistake  to  undervalue 


14  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Gower  too  much,  particularly  since  Lydgate  and 
Occleve,  his  and  Chaucer's  immediate  successors  in 
England,  utterly  failed  to  come  up  to  his  achieve- 
ment. "If  there  had  been  no  Chaucer,  Gower 
would  have  had  a  respectable  place  in  history  as 
the  one  '  correct '  poet  of  the  Middle  Ages,  as 
the  English  culmination  of  that  courtly  mediaeval 
poetry  which  had  its  rise  in  France  and  Provence 
two  or  three  hundred  years  before.  The  prize  for 
style  would  have  been  awarded  to  Gower ;  as  it  is, 
he  deserves  rather  more  consideration  than  he  has 
generally  received  in  modern  times.  It  is  easy  to 
pass  him  over  and  to  say  that  his  correctness  is 
flat,  his  poetical  art  monotonous.  But  at  the  very 
lowest  valuation,  he  did  what  no  one  else  except 
Chaucer  was  able  to  do  :  he  wrote  a  large  amount 
of  verse  in  perfect  accordance  with  his  critical 
principles,  in  such  a  way  as  to  stand  minute  ex- 
amination ;  and  in  this  he  thoroughly  expressed  the 
good  manners  of  his  time.  He  proved  that  English 
might  compete  with  the  languages  which  had  most 
distinguished  them  in  poetry.  Chaucer  did  as 
much ;  and  in  his  earlier  work  he  did  no  more 
than  Gower."1  That  from  his  best  critic  is  the 
most  that  can  be  said  for  him ;  it  may  be 
recorded  in  support  of  it  that  from  the  day  of  his 
death  in  1408  till  Sackville  and  perhaps  Spenser, 
no  one  attained  the  same  perfection  of  method  in 
English  verse. 

i  Prof.  W.  P.  Ker. 


FROM   CHAUCER   TO   MORE  15 

Chaucer's  English  successors,  Lydgate  and 
Occleve,  Skelton  and  Hawes,  have  a  certain 
historical  interest  in  that  they  did  indubitably, 
during  the  course  of  the  fifteenth  century  (a  period 
too  troubled  politically  in  England  to  have  much 
energy  for  literature),  write  certain  works  which 
keep  the  chain  of  the  production  of  verse  unbroken 
from  the  Canterbury  Tales  to  the  publication  of 
the  Induction  to  the  Mirror  for  Magistrates  and 
Tottel's  Miscellany.  But  Chaucer's  influence  in 
his  own  country  did  not  come  to  its  own  till  tlie 
publication  of  the  last-mentioned  book.  Surrey 
and  Wyatt,  and  those  who  worked  with  them,  are 
his  true  English  inheritors,  using  his  ideas,  his 
phraseSj  his  conventions,  and  very  often  his  actual 
words,  and  handing  on  the  best  part  of  his  bequests 
to  them  as  gifts  to  Spenser,  who  himself  went 
back  and  drew  further  from  the  riches  of  the 
original  estate.  The  earliest  and  greatest  school 
of  Chaucerians  flourished  not  in  England  but 
in  Scotland,  and  to  them  for  a  moment  we 
must  turn. 

Whether  the  first  of  the  four  great  Scottish 
poets  was  or  was  not  James  I.  of  Scotland  has 
been  a  question  recently  much  debated  by  literary 
historians.  What  is  certain  is,  that  the  first  great 
Scottish  poem  is  the  King's  Quair  (i.e.  "King's 
Book  "),  and  that  the  title,  the  earliest  manuscript, 
the  word  of  historians  in  the  century  following  its 
composition,  and  the  universal  witness  of  tradition, 


16  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

agree  in  crediting  him  with  the  authorship.  Who- 
ever wrote  it  (and  we  should  give  our  vote  for 
the  King  himself)  was  under  the  first  freshness  of 
the  Chaucerian  influence.  Unlike  Gavin  Douglas 
and  Dunbar,  and  in  a  lesser  degree  Henryson,  who 
followed  him,  James  writes  not  in  the  peculiar 
literary  Scots  (never  completely  a  spoken  language), 
but  in  the  dialect  which  Chaucer  himself  wrote. 
He  uses  the  Chaucerian  conventions — the  things 
learned  by  him  from  the  Romance  of  the  Rose — the 
garden,  the  sleep,  the  dream,  the  vision,  and  so  on. 
The  poem  has  the  dreamy  elegance  of  Chaucer's 
early  verse ;  the  grace  which  he  caught  from  the 
Romance  is  a  sort  of  fancy  work,  musical  and  senti- 
mental, with  a  mythology  of  personified  abstract 
qualities ;  a  little  thin  and  impalpable,  but  always 
graceful  and  always  full  of  the  freshness  of  spring- 
time which  seems  to  cling  about  this  light  and  glad 
dawn  of  modern  English  verse. 

His  successor  in  poetry,  Robert  Henryson, 
though  not  the  greatest  poet  of  the  period  (that 
title  belongs  to  Dunbar),  is  unquestionably  the 
most  accomplished  and  poetical  of  the  Chaucerian 
school.  Unlike  James  I.,  to  whom  can  certainly  be 
ascribed  only  the  one  poem,  Henryson  left  a  large 
body  of  authenticated  poetry.  He  completed  the 
story  of  Chaucer's  Troilus  and  Cressida  in  his 
powerful  romantic  poem,  The  Testament  ofCressyd ; 
he  versified  in  a  light  and  critical  manner  JEsop's 
Fables ;  did  another  romantic  poem,  Orpheus  and 


FROM   CHAUCER  TO   MORE  17 

Eurydice\  and,  best  known  of  all,  wrote,  in  the 
manner  of  the  old  French  pastourelle,  a  shepherd's 
wooing  ballad,  Robin  and  Makene,  which,  from 
its  inclusion  in  Percy's  Reliques,  has  remained 
popular  to  our  own  day.  The  best  of  his  works  is 
the  Testament,  a  thing  worthy  (and  there  could  be 
no  higher  praise)  to  be  set  beside  Chaucer's  master- 
piece itself.  To  Saturn  and  the  Moon  is  referred  by 
the  gods  the  punishment  which  Cressyd's  faithless- 
ness shall  receive,  and  they  decree  leprosy.  Struck 
with  the  terrible  disease,  she  goes  out  with  a  clapper 
and  a  dish  to  beg  for  food.  As  she  stands  waiting 
at  the  roadside,  a  gallant  company  rides  out  from 
Troy,  Troilus  among  them.  Their  eyes  meet,  but 
her  dim  vision  cannot  see  her  old  lover,  and  it  is 
impossible  for  him  to  see  Cressyd  in  the  ghastly 
creature  beside  his  horse.  She  receives  his  alms, 
is  told  by  one  of  his  companions  who  he  is,  utters 
a  last  complaint,  and,  having  sent  her  ring  to  him 
for  remembrance,  dies.  These  two  passages — that 
in  which  Saturn  pronounces  judgment  and  that 
describing  the  lovers'  meeting — are  as  near  per- 
fection as  they  could  be  ;  Chaucer  himself  did 
nothing  better  at  his  best.  They  touch  the  highest 
point,  after  him,  in  the  tragic  and  pathetic  qualities 
of  his  narrative  style.  'y  / 

The  greatest  of  this  group,  William  Dunbar,  is  ¥ 
unquestionably  the  greatest   Scottish  poet   before 
Burns,  and  perhaps  the  greatest  of  them  all.     No 
one  of  his  time,  except  Villon,  has  the  same  vigour 


18  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  expression,  and  the  same  hard  and  pungent 
quality  of  irony  in  his  outlook  ;  no  one  else  can 
show  the  same  range  of  power  and  the  same  diversity 
of  work.  Like  the  rest,  he  is  a  follower  of  Chaucer ; 
but  it  is  Chaucer  in  the  mood  of  the  Wife  of  Bath's 
prologue  that  he  prefers  to  follow,  or,  if  it  is  the 
Chaucer  of  the  Death  of  Blanche  the  Duchess,  then 
it  is  with  a  satirical  independence  of  his  own,  so  that, 
writing,  for  instance,  in  the  latitude  of  Edinburgh, 
he  will  have  nothing  to  do  with  May  mornings  and 
"  Fresh  flowers  green,"  but  embraces  the  east  wind 
straight  away  without  convention  or  pretence.  The 
Thistle  and  the  Rose,  his  most  Chaucerian  poem, 
written  to  welcome  Queen  Margaret,  daughter  of 
Henry  VII.,  to  Scotland,  is  written  gracefully  and 
with  spirit  and  good  sense.  The  Two  Married 
Women  and  the  Widow  (one  is  conscious  of  a  loss 
in  modernising  the  spelling  of  Dunbar's  titles)  has 
enormous  vigour  and  high  spirits  and  a  complete 
accomplishment  of  form  that  beats  all  his  con- 
temporaries. Like  his  Dance  of  the  Seven  Deadly 
Sins,  which  has  a  lurid  strength  unattainable  by 
Lydgate  and  Occleve,  his  English  contemporaries, 
the  Two  Married  Women  has  its  unpleasant  side. 
The  Wife  of  Bath  was  at  least  good-natured. 
"Dunbar's  wives  and  widow  combine  sensuality 
with  ill-nature  in  a  way  not  to  be  paralleled  in 
English  literature  till  we  come  to  the  relics  of 
the  Restoration."  Their  ugliness  is  swallowed  in 
the  mastery  with  which  their  portraiture  is  accom- 


FROM   CHAUCER   TO   MORE  19 

plished.  Not  till  some  of  Shakespeare's  or  Ben 
Jonson's  pieces  of  low  life  is  there  anything  in 
English  writing  half  so  good. 

(3) 

But  though  Chaucer's  followers  help  to  bridge 
the  gap  between  him  and  the  Elizabethans,  the 
main  stream  of  English  poetry  passed  into  other 
and  obscurer  channels.  The  origin  and  composition 
of  English  ballad  literature  has  always  been,  and  no 
doubt  will  always  be,  a  matter  of  fierce  critical  con- 
troversy, but  it  is  agreed  by  those  who  have  most 
carefully  studied  them,  that  it  was  in  the  fifteenth 
century  that  the  popular  and  romantic  ballads  as 
we  know  them  first  took  their  shape.  The  oldest  > 
of  them,  The  Hunting  of  the  Cheviot,  was  probably  V 
composed  as  early  as  1400,  the  year  of  Chaucer's 
death  ;  and  whatever  previous  shapes  they  may  have 
worn,  the  great  poems  in  this  kind  in  their  present 
form  are  subsequent  to  that  date.  This  theory 
corresponds  to  what  we  can  glean  from  external 
evidence,  but,  indeed,  the  ballads  bear  marks  them- 
selves which  support  it.  They  belong  to  a  period 
when  modern  English  as  we  know  it  was,  roughly 
speaking,  formed  ;  the  absence  of  inflexion  gives  a 
backward  date,  and  that  date  cannot  be  further  back 
than  the  fifteenth  century.  They  belong,  no  less 
certainly,  to  a  period  when  oral  transmission  was 
still  a  normal  way  of  preserving  poetry,  and  that 
cannot  be  later  than  early  in  the  sixteenth  century. 


20  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

With  the  coming  of  the  printed  broadsheet,  as 
we  shall  see,  the  romantic  ballad  died,  and  the 
occasional  ballad  was  born.  A  form  of  poetry 
which  had  till  then  been  valued  because  it  was  old, 
became  despised  unless  it  was  new,  and  the  ballad 
form,  degraded  till  it  did  no  more  than  serve  more 
or  less  metrically  the  uses  of  sensational  journalism, 
had  to  wait  till  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century 
before  it  was  used  again  for  literary  purposes. 
When  it  was  taken  up  again  it  was  consciously 
"  literary  "  and  no  longer  "  popular,"  but  the  men 
of  letters  who  used  it  could  find  no  better  model 
than  that  left  them  by  the  anonymous  and  co- 
operative authors  whose  work  has  survived. 

It  is  necessary  to  use  the  word  "  co-operative," 
because  it  is  plain  that  no  ballad  as  it  has  come 
down  to  us  is  the  unaltered  and  final  work  of  one 
man  ;  but  it  must  not  be  taken  to  imply  adherence 
to  the  curious  theory  of  communal  composition 
advanced  by  some  anthropologists,  and  fortified  by 
them  with  examples  from  the  practices  and  rituals 
of  savage  tribes,  ancient  and  modern,  in  both 
hemispheres.  Poetry  does  not  write  itself,  and  the 
fancied  picture  of  a  community  sitting  round  a 
village  or  camp  fire  and  evolving,  verse  about,  a 
ballad  of  the  kind  we  know,  remains  a  picture  of  the 
fancy  only.  What  in  the  first  instance  a  minstrel, 
bard,  or  troubadour  devised  and  sang,  popular  fancy, 
taking  hold  of,  moulded  and  altered,  consciously 
and  unconsciously,  each  man  who  memorised  it 


FROM  CHAUCER  TO   MORE  21 

adding  his  share  of  romance  or  fancy,  and  all  the 
time  that  great  instrument  and  artifice  of  literature, 
the  human  memory,  transmuting  it  unconsciously 
—taking  a  verse  from  one  poem  and  adding  it  to 
another,  so  that  scores  of  ballads  have  recurring 
parts  in  common — lightening  its  own  burden  by 
the  use  of  set  and  conventional  phrases,  planing 
away  roughnesses  of  metre  and  diction  till  the 
whole  thing  came  easily  along  the  channels  of  the 
brain  and  sped  flowingly  from  the  tongue.  Who 
the  original  authors  were  must  remain  for  ever 
unknown,  though  some  of  the  ballads  are  no 
doubt  popular  forms,  wrought  by  the  process 
indicated,  from  written  metrical  romances  of  the 
type  of  King  Horn,  which  got  into  the  hands  of 
wandering  singers,  and  from  them  to  the  people  at 
large.  It  must  have  been  the  process  of  popular 
transmission  which  gave  their  work  the  character 
which  we  know.  If  one  asks  oneself  what  it  is 
that  gives  the  ballads  their  unique  attractiveness, 
what  it  is  that  still  makes  them  stir  us  as  they  did 
Sir  Philip  Sidney,  as  the  sound  of  a  trumpet,  the 
answer  is  plain ;  it  is  not  the  things  wherein  they 
differ,  like  their  plots,  but  the  things  which  they 
have  in  common.  It  may  be  lines  like  this : — 

"  Then  he  pulled  forth  his  bright  brown  sword 
And  dried  it  on  his  sleeve  " ; 

or  this : — 

"  He  hadna  ridden  a  mile,  a  mile, 
A  mile  or  barely  three  " ; 


22  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

or  this  : — 

"  Lord  William  was  buried  in  St  Mary's  kirk, 

Lady  Margaret  in  Mary's  quire, 
Out  o'  the  lady's  grave  grew  a  bonny  red  rose 
And  out  o'  the  knight's  a  briar  " ; 

all  of  which  occur  in  more  than  one  ballad,  and 
all  but  the  first  two  lines  of  the  last  in  several. 
Or  it  may  be  things  which,  if  they  cannot  be 
matched  word  for  word  from  one  ballad  to  another, 
still  breathe  a  common  spirit.  They  are  the  things 
which,  as  it  were,  express  "  idea  "  (in  the  Platonic 
sense)  of  a  ballad — things  like 

u  Is  there  ony  room  at  your  head,  Saunders  ? 

Is  there  ony  room  at  your  feet  ? 

Or  ony  room  at  your  side,  Saunders, 

Where  fain,  fain,  I  wad  sleep  ?  " 

or  like 

"  Half-oure,  half-oure  to  Aberdour, 

'Tis  fifty  fathoms  deep  ; 
And  there  lies  gude  Sir  Patrick  Spens, 
Wi'  the  Scots  lords  at  his  feet " ; 

or  this,  with  its  quintessential  fragrance  of 
romance : — 

"  May  Margaret  sits  in  her  bower  door 

Sewing  her  silken  seam  ; 
She  heard  a  note  in  Elmond's  wood, 
And  wish'd  she  there  had  been. 

"  She  loot  the  seam  fa'  frae  her  side, 

The  needle  to  her  tae, 
And  she  is  on  to  Elmond's  wood 
As  fast  as  she  could  gae." 


FROM   CHAUCER   TO   MORE  23 

These  things,  and  the  ballads  which  enshrine  them, 
have  only  to  be  compared  with  a  typical  late  metrical 
romance  for  the  reader  to  see  at  once  the  superi- 
ority in  romantic  glamour,  in  narrative  skill,  in 
metrical  lilt  and  felicity,  of  the  popular  poem, 
the  fashioning  of  which  was  co-operative,  over  the 
product,  written  immediately  and  therefore  fixed 
in  form  once  and  for  all,  of  a  single  (and  average) 
mind.  For  the  authorship  of  a  ballad,  if  only  it 
were  left  to  oral  transmission,  never  ceased.  No 
new  possessor  of  it  but,  in  getting  it  by  heart, 
might  add,  all  unsuspecting,  some  new  fineness  or 
wipe  away  some  flaw. 

The  metrical  romance  was  written ;  it  could 
not  be  easily  or  quickly  spread  or  duplicated  save 
by  word  of  mouth,  and  oral  transmission,  as  we 
have  seen,  served  it  well.  The  invention  of  print- 
ing meant  the  cheap  and  unlimited  multiplication 
of  popular  poetry  (story-telling,  that  is,  without  a 
consciously  artistic  end),  in  the  form  in  which  it 
was  first  written,  and  printing  killed  the  ballad 
almost  as  soon  as  it  came.  Where  the  broadside 
went  there  was  no  more  need  for  singing  or 
reciting ;  ballads  could  be  read  more  quickly  than 
they  could  be  heard  or  learned.  The  appetite  for 
them  increased  and  the  supply  kept  pace  with 
the  increase ;  thousands  of  broadside  ballads 
poured  from  the  press.  Unlike  the  older  oral 
ballads,  which  were  concerned  with  romance  or 
tradition,  the  printed  ballads  sought  news.  They 


24  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

were,  or  pretended  to  be,  matters  of  fact,  carrying 
as  often  as  not  the  date  of  the  occurrence  they 
commemorated  on  their  face.  Glasgerion,  Clerk 
Saunders,  Chevy  Chase,  and  The  Demon  Lover 
slipped  quietly  down  into  the  underworld  of  the 
antiquaries,  not  to  be  fished  out  again  for  two 
/  hundred  years.  In  their  place  came  ballads  of 
hangings,  highwaymen,  religious  conversions, 
monstrous  births,  and  all  the  stock-in-trade  of 
Autolycus  and  his  kind.  So  the  ballad  passed 
out  of  literature. 

(4) 

Chaucer  and  his  followers  and  the  ballad- makers 

>    between  them  are  the  fount  from  which  modern 

English  poetry  springs;   it  is  not  till  a  hundred 

years  or  so  after   Chaucer's   death  that  we  come 

upon  the  beginnings  of  English  prose.     Chaucer's 

own  exercises  in  prose  are  poor ;  they  spring  not 

from  his  love  of  literature,  but  from  his  love  of 

learning — are  either  sermons  like  the  Parson's  Tale,  ' 

or  translations  of  popular  philosophy  like  his  Boece, 

or  treatises  on  popular  science  like  that   on  the 

Astrolabe,  done  for  "little  Lewis,  my  son."     He 

was  not  interested,  one  feels,  in  prose  style  (though 

curiously  the  tale  he  tells  himself  in  the  Canterbury 

pilgrimage  is  in  this   medium),  and   this  lack  of 

interest  probably  arose  from  the  fact  that  he  had 

before  him  no  models  as  he  had  in  poetry  on  which 

to  form  what  he  wrote.     Good  prose  began  to  be 


FROM   CHAUCER  TO   MORE  25 

written  in  England  a  century  after  him  as  the  result 
of  three  influences,  one  of  a  fresh  subject-matter 
and  the  other  two  opposite  literary  impulses,  which 
ultimately  turned  side  by  side  and  combined  with 
each  other.  There  was  the  impulse  to  copy  the 
newly  found  masterpieces  of  classical  literature  in 
an  English  dress,  and  there  was  the  impulse  which 
feared  that  as  a  result  of  this  the  Anglo-Saxon 
purity  of  the  national  tongue  was  being  put  in 
danger,  and  strove  to  avert  the  evil  by  putting 
native  English,  as  distinct  from  latinised  English, 
on  its  own  legs. 

The  Renaissance  reached  England  late.  By  the 
time  its  triumph  was  at  its  height  in  the  work  of 
Spenser  and  Shakespeare,  it  had  died  out  in  Italy, 
and  in  France,  to  which  in  turn  Italy  had  passed 
the  torch,  it  was  already  a  warning  fire.  When  it 
came  to  England,  it  came  in  a  special  form  shaped 
by  political  and  social  conditions.  Hardly  had  the 
forces  of  secular  culture  been  mobilised  by  the 
leaders  in  the  van — men  like  Grocyn  and  Linacre 
and  Colet — when  at  their  heels  came  the  heralds 
of  religious  revolt.  Linacre  and  Colet  were  school- 
masters who  wanted  to  do  no  more  than  plant 
the  new  classical  learning  in  England.  They 
cared  for  the  graces  of  latinity,  for  the  study 
of  rhetoric,  wished  that  their  pupils  might  write 
Latin  like  Cicero,  and  English  like  him  too. 
But  the  newly  found  books  set  men  not  only 
trying  to  write  like  them,  but,  what  was  more 


26  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

dangerous,  think  like  them.  Erasmus  carried  the 
solvent  of  his  learning  across  the  Channel  to  this 
country.  Men  began  to  think  for  themselves  on 
the  dogmas  they  had  accepted  unquestioningly,  and 
the  Reformation,  on  the  side  of  thought  (not  of 
ecclesiastical  politics),  got  its  first  impetus.  To 
Erasmus  and  his  teaching  we  must  put  down  the 
work  of  men  like  Sir  John  Cheke,  Sir  Thomas 
Wilson,  and  Roger  Ascham.  To  the  earlier  group, 
interested  mainly  in  literary  things,  or,  if  in  religious 
and  philosophical,  not  anxious  to  break  with  ortho- 
doxy, we  can  fairly  attach  the  work  of  Sir  Thomas 

^  More. 

v  His  Utopia,  based  as  it  is  on  Plato's  Republic, 
is  the  earliest  fruit  of  the  most  lasting  impulse  in 
the  Renaissance  study  of  the  subject-matter  of 
Latin  and  Greek  literature — the  impulse  given  by 
the  political  speculation  of  the  ancients,  which  re- 
appears in  late  books  like  Harrington's  Oceana  and 
Bacon's  New  Atlantis,  and,  in  a  different  form,  in 
the  translations  from  Plutarch,  in  essays  like 
Montaigne's  and  Bacon's,  and  in  the  constant 
political  allusions  and  theorisings  which  are  to  be 
found  in  plays.  In  one  way  or  another,  the  redis- 
covery of  Plato  proved  the  most  valuable  part  of 
the  Renaissance's  gift  from  Greece.  The  doctrines 
of  the  Symposium  coloured  in  Italy  the  writings  of 
Castiglione  and  Mirandula.  In  England  they  gave 
us  Spenser's  Hymn  of  Heavenly  Beauty,  and  they 
affected,  each  in  his  own  way,  Sir  Philip  Sidney  and 


FROM   CHAUCER   TO   MORE  27 

others  of  the  circle  of  court  writers  of  his  time. 
M ore's  book  was  written  in  Latin,  though  there  is 
an  English  translation  almost  contemporary.  He 
combines  in  himself  a  strain  drawn  from  the  active 
side  of  the  Renaissance  as  well  as  from  the  studious, 
for  besides  its  origin  in  Plato,  Utopia  owes  not  a 
little  to  the  influence  of  the  voyages  of  discovery. 
In  1507  there  was  published  a  little  book  called  An  \. 
Introduction  to  Cosmography,  which  gave  an  account 
of  the  four  voyages  of  Amerigo.  In  the  story  of  the 
fourth  voyage  it  is  narrated  that  twenty-four  men 
were  left  in  a  fort  near  Cape  Bahia.  More  used 
this  detail  as  a  starting-point,  and  onef  of  the  men 
whom  Amerigo  left  tells  the  story  of  this  "  No- 
where," a  republic  mostly  resembling  the  ideal 
world  of  Plato,  but  largely  studied  from  and  con- 
trasted with  contemporary  England.  It  is  the  same 
in  all  books  of  this  kind,  because  no  man  can  escape 
from  the  influence  of  his  own  time  whatever  road 
he  takes,  whether  the  road  of  imagination  or  any 
other.  His  imagination  can  only  build  out  of  the 
materials  afforded  him  by  his  own  experience ;  he 
can  alter,  he  can  rearrange,  but  he  cannot  in  the 
strictest  sense  of  the  word  create,  and  every  city  of 
dreams  is  only  the  scheme  of  things  as  they  are  re- 
moulded nearer  to  the  desire  of  a  man's  heart.  In 
a  way,  More  has  less  invention  than  some  of  his 
subtler  followers,  but,  like  them,  he  excels  best  where 
he  is  most  satirical.  Utopias  are  interesting  most 
to  us  when  they  give  us  new  eyes  to  see  things  as 


28  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

they  are.     This — the  first  of  many  in  England — is 
no  exception  to  the  rule. 

The  followers  of  Erasmus  link  themselves  more 
closely  with  the  great  age  of  English  prose  which 
followed,  and  the  lives  of  many  of  them  go  on  well 

/  into  Elizabeth's  reign.  Sir  Thomas  Wilson,  who 
translated  Demosthenes  and  wrote  a  famous  text- 
book of  rhetoric,  was  one  of  her  secretaries  of  state. 
Roger  Ascham  wrote  his  Toocophilus — a  dialogue 
on  the  use  of  the  bow,  done  on  a  classical  model 
— while  Henry  VIII.  was  still  on  the  throne,  and 

v  did  not  finish  his  Schoolmaster  till  ten  years  after 
Elizabeth's  accession.  But  literature  as  it  de- 
veloped in  the  reign  of  Elizabeth  ran  the  other 
way  from  their  desires  and  hopes.  The  men  of 
the  earlier  Renaissance,  in  the  reign  of  Edward  VI. 
and  Mary,  belonged  to  a  graver  school  than  their 
successors.  They  were  no  splendid  courtiers,  nor 
daring  and  hardy  adventurers,  still  less  swash- 
bucklers, exquisites,  or  literary  dandies.  Their 
names — Sir  John  Cheke,  Roger  Ascham,  Nicholas 
Udall,  Thomas  Wilson,  Walter  Haddon — belong 
rather  to  the  universities  and  to  the  coteries  of 
learning  than  to  the  court.  To  the  nobility,  from 
whose  essays  in  belles  kttres  Elizabethan  poetry 
was  to  develop,  they  stood  in  the  relation  of  tutors 
rather  than  of  companions,  suspecting  the  extra- 
vagances of  their  pupils  rather  than  sympathising 
with  their  ideals.  They  were  a  band  of  serious 
and  dignified  scholars,  men  preoccupied  with 


FROM  CHAUCER  TO   MORE  29 

morality  and  good  citizenship,  and  holding  these 
to  be  worth  more  than  the  lighter  interests  of 
learning  and  style.  It  is  perhaps  characteristic  of 
the  English  temper  that  the  revival  of  the  classical 
tongues,  which  in  Italy  made  for  paganism  and 
the  pursuit  of  pleasure  in  life  and  art,  in  England  > 
brought  with  it  a  new  seriousness  and  gravity  in 
life  and  art,  and  in  religion  the  Reformation.  But 
in  a  way,  the  scholars  fought  against  tendencies  in 
their  age  which  were  both  too  fast  and  too  strong 
for  them.  At  a  time  when  young  men  were 
writing  poetry  modelled  on  the  delicate  and  ex- 
travagant verse  of  Italy,  were  reading  Italian 
novels,  and  affecting  Italian  fashions  in  speech  and 
dress,  they  were  fighting  for  sound  education,  for 
good  classical  scholarship,  for  the  purity  of  native 
English,  and,  behind  all  these,  for  the  native  strength 
and  worth  of  the  English  character,  which  they 
felt  to  be  endangered  by  orgies  of  reckless  assimila- 
tion from  abroad.  The  revival  of  the  classics  at 
Oxford  and  Cambridge  could  not  produce  an 
Erasmus  or  a  Scaliger  ;  we  have  no  fine  critical 
scholarship  of  this  age  to  put  beside  that  of  Holland 
or  France.  Sir  John  Cheke  and  his  followers  felt 
they  had  a  public  and  national  duty  to  perform, 
and  their  knowledge  of  the  classics  only  served 
them  for  examples  of  high  living  and  morality,  on 
which  education,  in  its  sense  of  the  formation  of 
character,  could  be  based. 

In  the  work  of  these  men,  as  we  have  said,  two 


30  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

impulses  fought  with  each  other.  The  reading  of 
Cicero  intoxicated  men  with  a  new  full-mouthed 
and  decorative  language  unknown  to  English  at 
that  date.  Latinism,  like  every  new  craze,  became 
a  passion,  and  ran  through  the  less  intelligent 
kinds  of  writing  in  a  wild  excess.  Not  much  of 
the  literature  of  this  time  remains  in  common 
knowledge,  and  for  examples  of  these  affectations 
one  must  turn  over  the  pages  of  forgotten  books. 
There  high-sounding  and  familiar  words  are  handled 
and  bandied  about  with  delight,  and  you  can  see 
in  volume  after  volume  these  minor  and  forgotten 
authors  gloating  over  the  new-found  treasure 
which  placed  them  in  their  time  in  the  van  of 
literary  success.  That  they  are  obsolete  now,  and 
indeed  were  obsolete  before  they  were  dead,  is  a 
warning  to  authors  who  intend  similar  extra- 
vagances. Strangeness  and  exoticism  are  not 
lasting  wares.  By  the  time  of  Love's  Labour  s 
Lost  they  had  become  nothing  more  than  matter 
for  laughter,  and  it  is  only  through  their  reflection 
and  distortion  in  Shakespeare's  pages  that  we 
know  them  now. 

Had  not  a  restraining  influence,  anxiously  and 
even  acrimoniously  urged,  broken  in  on  their 
endeavours,  the  English  language  to-day  might 
have  been  almost  as  completely  latinised  as  Spanish 
or  Italian.  That  the  essential  Saxon  purity  of  our 
tongue  has  been  preserved  is  to  the  credit  not  of 
sensible  unlettered  people  eschewing  new  fashions 


FROM   CHAUCER   TO   MORE  31 

they  could  not  comprehend,  but  to  the  scholars 
themselves.  The  chief  service  that  Cheke  and  ,  / 
Ascham  and  their  fellows  rendered  to  English  / 
literature  was  their  crusade  against  the  exaggerated 
latinity  that  they  had  themselves  helped  to  make 
possible,  the  crusade  against  what  they  called 
"inkhorn  terms."  "  1  am  of  this  opinion,"  said 
Cheke  in  a  prefatory  letter  to  a  book  translated  by 
a  friend  of  his,  "  that  our  own  tongue  should  be 
written  clean  and  pure,  unmixed  and  unmangled 
with  the  borrowing  of  other  tongues,  wherein  if 
we  take  not  heed  by  time,  ever  borrowing  and 
never  paying,  she  shall  be  fain  to  keep  her  house 
as  bankrupt."  Writings  in  the  Saxon  vernacular, 
like  the  sermons  of  Latimer,  who  was  careful  to 
use  nothing  not  familiar  to  the  common  people, 
did  much  to  help  the  scholars  to  save  our  prose 
from  the  extravagances  which  they  dreaded.  Their 
attack  was  directed  no  less  against  the  revival  of 
really  obsolete  words.  It  is  a  paradox  worth  noting 
for  its  strangeness  that  the  first  revival  of  medi- 
sevalism  in  modern  English  literature  was  in  the 
Renaissance  itself.  Talking  in  studious  archaism 
seems  to  have  been  a  fashionable  practice  in  society 
and  court  circles.  "  The  fine  courtier,"  says  Thomas 
Wilson  in  his  Art  of  Rhetoric,  "will  talk  nothing 
but  Chaucer."  The  scholars  of  the  English  Re- 
naissance fought  not  only  against  the  ignorant 
adoption  of  their  importations,  but  against  their 
renewal  of  forgotten  habits  of  speech. 


32  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Their  efforts  failed,  and  their  ideals  had  to  wait 
for  their  acceptance  till  the  age  of  Dryden,  when 
Shakespeare  and  Spenser  and  Milton,  all  of  them 
authors  who  consistently  violated  the  standards  of 
Cheke,  had  done  their  work.  The  fine  courtier 
who  would  talk  nothing  but  Chaucer  was  in  Eliza- 
beth's reign  the  saving  of  English  verse.  The 
beauty  and  richness  of  Spenser  is  based  directly  on 
words  he  got  from  Troilus  and  Cressida  and  the 
<  Canterbury  Tales.  Some  of  the  most  sonorous 
>  and  beautiful  lines  in  Shakespeare  break  every 
canon  laid  down  by  the  humanists. 

"  The  extravagant  and  erring  spirit  hies 
To  his  confine  " 

is  a  sentence,  three  of  the  chief  words  of  which  are 
Latin  importations  that  come  unfamiliarly,  bearing 
their  original  interpretation  with  them.  In  attack- 
i  /ing  latinisms  and  the  language  borrowed  from 
Bolder  poets,  Cheke  and  his  associates  were  attacking 
the  two  chief  sources  of  the  Elizabethans'  poetic 
;  vocabulary.  All  the  sonorousness,  beauty,  and 
dignity  of  the  poetry  and  the  drama  which  followed 
them  would  have  been  lost  had  they  succeeded  in 
their  object,  and  their  verse  would  have  been  con- 
strained into  the  warped  and  ugly  forms  of  Stern- 
hold  and  Hopkins  and  those  with  them  who  com- 
posed the  first  and  worst  metrical  version  of  the 
psalms.  When  their  ideal  reappeared,  phantasy  and 
imagery  had  temporarily  worn  themselves  out,  and 
a  richer  language  made  simplicity  possible  in  poetry. 


FROM   CHAUCER  TO   MORE  33 

Chaucer  went  to  Italy  for  the  plots  of  his 
greatest  stories ;  the  English  scholars  travelled 
there  to  imbibe  the  new  learning  at  its  spring. 
There  resulted  a  circumstance  which  had  a  marked 
and  continuous  influence  on  the  literary  age  that 
followed.  On  the  heels  of  the  men  of  learning 
went  the  men  of  fashion,  eager  to  learn  and  copy 
the  new  manners  of  a  society  whose  moral  teacher 
was  Machiavelli,  and  whose  patterns  of  splendour 
were  the  courts  of  Florence  and  Ferrara,  and  to 
learn  the  trick  of  verse  that  in  the  hands  of 
Petrarch  and  his  followers  had  fashioned  the  sonnet 
and  other  new  lyric  forms.  This  could  not  be 
without  its  influence  on  the  manners  of  the  nation, 
and  the  scholars  who  had  been  the  first  to  show 
the  way  were  the  first  to  deplore  the  pell-mell 
assimilation  of  Italian  manners  and  vices,  which 
was  the  unintended  result  of  the  inroad  on  in- 
sularity which  had  already  begun.  They  saw  the 
danger  ahead,  and  they  laboured  to  meet  it  as  it 
came.  Ascham  in  his  Schoolmaster  railed  against 
the  translation  of  Italian  books,  and  the  corrupt 
manner  of  living  and  false  ideas  which  they 
seemed  to  him  to  breed.  The  Italianate  English- 
man became  the  chief  part  of  the  stock-in-trade 
of  the  satirists  and  moralists  of  the  day.  Stubbs, 
a  Puritan  chronicler,  whose  book  The  Anatomy 
of  Abuses  is  a  valuable  aid  to  the  study  of 
Tudor  social  history,  and  Harrison,  whose  descrip- 
tion of  England  prefaces  Holinshed's  Chronicles, 

3 


34  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

both  deal  in  detail  with  the  Italian  menace, 
and  condemn  in  good  set  terms  the  costliness 
in  dress  and  the  looseness  in  morals  which 
they  laid  to  its  charge.  Indeed,  the  effect  on 
England  was  profound,  and  it  lasted  for  more 
than  two  generations.  The  romantic  traveller, 
Coryat,  writing  well  within  the  seventeenth  century 
in  praise  of  the  luxuries  of  Italy  (among  which  he 
numbers  forks  for  table  use),  is  as  enthusiastic  as 
the  authors  who  began  the  imitation  of  Italian 
metres  in  Tottel's  Miscellany,  and  Donne  and  Hall 
in  their  satires  written  under  James  wield  the  rod 
of  censure  as  sternly  as  had  Ascham  a  good  half- 
century  before.  No  doubt  there  was  something  in 
the  danger  they  dreaded,  but  the  evil  was  not  un- 
mixed with  good,  for  insularity  will  always  be  an 
enemy  of  good  literature.  The  Elizabethans  learned 
much  more  than  their  plots  from  Italian  models, 
and  the  worst  effects  dreaded  by  the  patriots 
never  reached  our  shores.  Italian  vice  stopped 
short  of  real  life  ;  poisoning  and  hired  ruffianism 
flourished  only  on  the  stage. 


CHAPTER  II 

ELIZABETHAN    POETRY    AND    PROSE 

(1) 

To  understand  Elizabethan  literature  it  is  necessary 
to  remember  that  the  social  status  it  enjoyed  was 
far  different  from  that  of  literature  in  our  own  day. 
The  splendours  of  the  Medicis  in  Italy  had  set  up 
an  ideal  of  courtliness,  in  which  letters  formed  an 
integral  and  indispensable  part.  For  the  Renais- 
sance, the  man  of  letters  was  only  one  aspect  of 
the  gentleman,  and  the  true  gentleman,  as  books 
so  early  and  late  respectively  as  Castiglione's 
Courtier  and  Peacham's  Complete  Gentleman  show, 
numbered  poetry  as  a  necessary  part  of  his  ac- 
complishments. In  England  special  circumstances 
intensified  this  tendency  of  the  time.  The  queen 
was  unmarried :  she  was  the  first  single  woman  to 
wear  the  English  crown,  and  her  vanity  made  her 
value  the  devotion  of  the  men  about  her  as  some- 
thing more  intimate  than  mere  loyalty  or  patriotism. 
She  loved  personal  homage,  particularly  the  hom- 
age of  half-amatory  eulogy  in  prose  and  verse.  It 
followed  that  the  ambition  of  every  courtier  was  to 
be  an  author,  like  Lord  Buckhurst  and  Sir  Philip 
Sidney,  and  of  every  author  to  be  a  courtier,  like 

35 


36  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

Edmund  Spenser  and  John  Lyly ;  in  fact,  outside 
the  drama,  which  was  almost  the  only  popular 
writing  at  the  time,  every  author  was  in  a  greater 
or  less  degree  attached  to  the  court.  If  they  were 
not  enjoying  its  favours  they  were  pleading  for 
them,  mingling  high  and  fantastic  compliment 
with  bitter  reproaches  and  a  tale  of  misery.  And 
consequently  both  the  poetry  and  the  prose  of  the 
time  are  restricted  in  their  scope  and  temper  to 
i  the  artificial  and  romantic,  to  high-flown  eloquence, 
to  the  celebration  of  love  and  devotion,  or  to  the 
inculcation  of  those  courtly  virtues  and  accom- 
plishments which  composed  the  perfect  pattern  of 
a  gentleman.  Not  that  there  was  not  both  poetry 
and  prose  written  outside  this  charmed  circle. 
The  pamphleteers  and  chroniclers,  Dekker  and 
Nash,  Holinshed  and  Harrison  and  Stow,  were 
setting  down  their  histories  and  descriptions,  and 
penning  those  detailed  and  realistic  indictments 
of  the  follies  and  extravagances  of  fashion,  which 
together  with  the  comedies  have  enabled  us  to 
picture  accurately  the  England  and  especially  the 
London  of  Elizabeth's  reign.  There  was  fine 
poetry  written  by  Marlowe  and  Chapman  as  well 
as  by  Sidney  and  Spenser,  but  the  court  was  still 
the  main  centre  of  literary  endeavour,  and  the 
main  incitement  to  literary  fame  and  success. 

But  whether  an  author  was  a  courtier  or  a 
Londoner  living  by  his  wits,  writing  was  never  the 
main  business  of  his  life :  all  the  writers  of  the 


ELIZABETHAN  POETRY   AND   PROSE        37 

time  were  in  one  way  or  another  men  of  action 
and  affairs.  As  late  as  Milton  it  is  probably  true 
to  say  that  writing  was  in  the  case  even  of  the 
greatest  an  avocation,  something  indulged  in  at 
leisure  outside  a  man's  main  business.  All  the 
Elizabethan  authors  had  crowded  and  various 
careers.  Of  Sir  Philip  Sidney  his  earliest  bio- 
grapher, Lord  Greville,  says,  "  The  truth  is,  his  end 
was  not  writing,  even  while  he  wrote,  but  both  his 
wit  and  understanding  bent  upon  his  heart  to 
make  himself  and  others  not  in  words  or  opinion 
but  in  life  and  action  good  and  great."  Ben 
Jonson  was  in  turn  a  soldier,  a  poet,  a  bricklayer, 
an  actor,  and  ultimately  the  first  poet  laureate. 
Lodge,  after  leaving  Oxford,  passed  through  the 
various  professions  of  soldiering,  medicine,  play- 
writing,  and  fiction,  and  he  wrote  his  novel 
Rosalind,  on  which  Shakespeare  based  As  You 
Like  It,  while  he  was  sailing  on  a  piratical  venture 
on  the  Spanish  Main.  This  connection  between 
life  and  action  affected  as  we  have  seen  the  tone 
and  quality  of  Elizabethan  writing.  "All  the 
distinguished  writers  of  the  period,"  says  Thoreau, 
"  possess  a  greater  vigour  and  naturalness  than  the 
more  modern  .  .  .  you  have  constantly  the  warrant 
of  life  and  experience  in  what  you  read.  The  little 
that  is  said  is  eked  out  by  implication  of  the  much 
that  was  done."  In  another  passage  the  same 
writer  explains  the  strength  and  fineness  of  the 
writings  of  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  by  this  very  test 


38  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  action,  "  The  word  which  is  best  said  came 
nearest  to  not  being  spoken  at  all,  for  it  is  cousin 
to  a  deed  which  the  speaker  could  have  better 
done.  Nay  almost  it  must  have  taken  the  place 
of  a  deed  by  some  urgent  necessity,  even  by  some 
misfortune,  so  that  the  truest  writer  will  be  some 
captive  knight  after  all."  This  bond  between 
literature  and  action  explains  more  than  the  writ- 
ings of  the  voyagers  or  the  pamphlets  of  men  who 
lived  in  London  by  what  they  could  make  off 
their  fellows.  Literature  has  always  a  twofold 
relation  to  life  as  it  is  lived.  It  is  both  a  mirrer 
and  an  escape:  in  our  own  day  the  stirring  romances 
of  Stevenson,  the  full-blooded  and  vigorous  life 
which  beats  through  the  pages  of  Mr  Kipling,  the 
conscious  brutalism  of  such  writers  as  Mr  Conrad 
and  Mr  Hewlett,  the  plays  of  J.  M.  Synge,  occupied 
with  the  vigorous  and  coarse-grained  life  of  tinkers 
and  peasants,  are  all  in  their  separate  ways  a  re- 
action against  an  age  in  which  the  overwhelming 
majority  of  men  and  women  have  sedentary  pur-, 
suits.  In  the  same  way  the  Elizabethan  who 
passed  his  commonly  short  and  crowded  life  in  an 
atmosphere  of  throat-cutting  and  powder  and  shot, 
and  in  a  time  when  affairs  of  state  were  more 
momentous  for  the  future  of  the  nation  than  they 
have  ever  been  since,  needed  perhaps  his  escape 
from  the  things  which  pressed  in  upon  him  every 
day.  So  grew  the  vogue  and  popularity  of  pastoral 
poetry  and  the  pastoral  romance. 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY   AND   PROSE         39 


(2) 

It  is  with  a  group  of  courtiers  that  our  fifteenth- 
century  poetry  begins.  In  the  latter  end  of  King 
Henry  VIII.'s  reign,  says  Puttenham  in  his  Art 
of  Poesie  (1589),  there  "  sprang  up  a  new  company 
of  courtly  makers  of  whom  Sir  Thomas  Wyatt  and 
the  Earl  of  Surrey  were  the  two  chieftains,  who, 
having  travelled  into  Italy  and  there  tasted  the 
sweet  and  stately  measures  and  style  of  Italian 
poesie  .  .  .  they  greatly  polished  our  rude  and 
homely  manner  of  vulgar  poesie  from  what  it  had 
been  before,  and  for  that  cause  may  justly  be  said 
the  first  reformers  of  our  English  metres  and  style." 
They  were  busy  men ;  they  had  no  patrons  to 
please,  and  they  belonged  to  a  class  in  which 
manuscript  rather  than  print  was  still  the  normal 
way  of  putting  words  on  paper.  It  was  not  until 
ten  years  after  the  death  of  the  second  of  them 
that  their  poems  appeared  in  print.  The  book 
that  contained  them,  Tottel's  Miscellany  of  Songs  \/ 
and  Sonnets  (it  was  published  first  in  1557  and  went 
through  six  other  editions)  is  one  of  the  landmarks 
of  English  literature.  It  begins  lyrical  love  poetry 
in  our  language.  It  begins,  too,  as  Puttenham 
observes,  the  imitation  and  adaptation  of  foreign 
and  chiefly  Italian  metrical  forms,  many  of  which 
have  since  become  characteristic  forms  of  English 
verse :  so  characteristic,  that  we  scarcely  think  of 
them  as  other  than  native  in  origin.  And  it  begins 


40  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

that  study  of  Chaucer  as  a  master  which  was  to 
produce  Spenser.  To  Wyatt  belongs  the  honour 
of  introducing  the  sonnet,  and  to  Surrey  the  more 
momentous  credit  of  writing,  for  the  first  time  in 
English,  blank  verse.  Wyatt  fills  the  most  im- 
portant place  in  the  Miscellany,  and  his  work, 
experimental  in  tone  and  quality,  formed  the 
example  which  Surrey  and  minor  writers  in  the 
same  volume  and  all  the  later  poets  of  the  age 
copied.  He  tries  his  hand  at  everything — songs, 
madrigals,  elegies,  complaints,  and  sonnets — and  he 
takes  his  models  from  both  ancient  Rome  and 
modern  Italy.  Indeed,  there  is  scarcely  anything 
in  the  volume  for  which  with  some  trouble  and 
research  one  might  not  find  an  original  in  Petrarch, 
or  in  the  poets  of  Italy  who  followed  him.  But 
imitation,  frequent  though  it  is  in  his  work,  does 
not  crowd  out  originality  of  feeling  and  poetic 
temper.  At  times,  he  sounds  a  personal  note :  his 
joy  on  leaving  Spain  for  England,  his  feelings  in 
the  Tower,  his  life  at  the  Court  amongst  his  books, 
and  as  a  country  gentleman  enjoying  hunting  and 
other  outdoor  sports : 

"  This  maketh  me  at  home  to  hunt  and  hawk, 
And  in  foul  weather  at  my  book  to  sit, 
In  frost  and  snow,  then  with  my  bow  to  stalk, 
No  man  does  mark  whereas  I  ride  or  go : 
In  lusty  leas  at  liberty  I  walk." 

It  is  easy  to  see  that  poetry  as  a  melodious  and 
enriched  expression  of  a  man's  own  feelings  is  in  its 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY   AND  PROSE        41 

infancy  here.  But  it  is  hardly  fair  to  judge  Wyatt 
by  this  side  of  his  work.  He  was  happier  in  re- 
creating and  putting  new  life  into  that  lyrical  mood 
which  had  appeared  fitfully  in  the  thirteenth  century 
in  the  work  of  unnamed  singers,  but  which  in  time 
to  come  was  to  be  one  of  the  chiefest  glories  of 
English  verse.  Such  verses  as 

"  Forget  not  yet  the  kind  intent 
Of  such  a  truth  as  I  have  meant ; 
My  great  travail  so  gladly  spent 
Forget  not  yet ! " 

and  those  which  follow  it,  or  such  lines  as 

"  And  wilt  thou  leave  me  thus 
That  hath  loved  thee  so  long 
In  wealth  and  woe  among  ? 
And  is  thy  heart  so  strong 
As  for  to  leave  me  thus  ? 
Say  nay  !     Say  nay  !  " 

are  a  worthy  prelude  to  the  Elizabethan  lyric. 
The  new  poets  had  to  find  their  own  language, 
to  enrich  with  borrowings  from  Other  tongues  the 
stock  of  words  suitable  for  poetry  which  the  drop- 
ping of  inflection  had  left  to  English.  Wyatt  was 
at  the  beginning  of  the  process,  but  his  gracious 
and  courtly  temper  and  his  fine  sincerity  of  feeling 
give  his  work  an  interest  greater  than  the  mere 
pleasure  of  experimenting  could  afford. 

Surrey,  so  it  seems  in  comparing  his  work,  went  a 
step  further.  He  allows  himself  oftener  the  luxury 
of  a  reference  to  personal  feelings,  and  his  poetry 
contains  from  place  to  place  a  fairly  full  record  of 


V 


vl 


42  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

the  vicissitudes  of  his  life.     A  prisoner  at  Windsor, 
he  recalls  his  childhood  there : 

"  The  large  green  courts  where  we  were  wont  to  hove,1 
The  palme-play,  where,  despoiled  for  the  game, 
With  dazzled  eyes  oft  we  by  gleams  of  love 
Have  missed  the  ball,  and  got  sight  of  our  dame." 

Like  Wyatt's,  his  verses  are  rough  in  places,  but 
a  sympathetic  ear  can  catch  in  them  something  of 
the  accent  that  distinguishes  the  verse  of  Sidney 
and  Spenser.  He  is  greater  than  Wyatt,  not  so 
much  for  greater  skill  as  for  more  boldness  in 
experiment.  Wyatt  in  his  sonnets  had  used  the 
Petrarchan  or  Italian  form,  the  form  used  later  in 
England  by  Milton  and  in  the  nineteenth  century 
by  Rossetti.  He  built  up  each  poem,  that  is,  in 
two  parts,  the  octave,  a  two-rhymed  section  of 
eight  lines  at  the  beginning,  followed  by  the  sestet, 
a  six-line  close  with  three  rhymes.  The  form  fits 
itself  very  well  to  the  double  mood  which  com- 
monly inspires  a  poet  using  the  sonnet  form ;  the 
second  section  as  it  were  both  echoing  and  answer- 
ing the  first,  following  doubt  with  hope,  or  sadness 
with  resignation,  or  resolving  a  problem  set  itself 
by  the  heart.  Surrey  tried  another  manner,  the 
manner  which  by  its  use  in  Shakespeare's  sonnets 
has  come  to  be  regarded  as  the  English  form  of 
this  kind  of  lyric.  His  sonnets  are  virtually  three- 
stanza  poems  with  a  couplet  for  close,  and  he 
allows  himself  as  many  rhymes  as  he  chooses. 

1  I.e.  hover. 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY   AND   PROSE         43 

The  structure  is  obviously  easier,  and  it  gives  a 
better  chance  to  an  inferior  workman,  but  in  the 
hands  of  a  master  its  harmonies  are  no  less  delicate, 
and  its  capacity  to  represent  changing  modes  of 
thought  no  less  complete  than  those  of  the  true 
form  of  Petrarch.  Blank  verse,  which  was  Surrey's 
other  gift  to  English  poetry  (through  his  transla-  \/ 
tion  of  the  ^Eneid,  published  after  his  death  in 
the  same  year  as  the  Songs  and  Sonnets  and  the 
first  verse  translation l  into  English  of  any  classical 
poet),  was  in  a  way  a  compromise  between  the 
two  sources  from  which  the  English  Renaissance 
drew  its  inspiration.  Latin  and  Greek  verse  is 
quantitative  and  rhymeless  ;  Italian  verse,  built  up 
on  the  metres  of  the  troubadours  and  the  degenera- 
tion of  Latin  which  gave  the  world  the  Romance 
languages,  used  many  elaborate  forms  of  rhyme. 
Blank  verse  took  from  Latin  its  rhymelessness,  but  \/ 
it  retained  the  mediaeval  accent  instead  of  quantity 
as  the  basis  of  its  line.  Here  is  a  favourable  sample 
of  Surrey's  use  of  it : — 

"  With  this  the  young  men's  courage  did  increase, 
And  through  the  dark,  like  to  the  ravening  wolves 
Whom  raging  fury  of  their  empty  maws 
Drives  to  their  den,  leaving  with  hungry  throats 
Their  whelps  behind,  among  our  foes  we  ran 
Upon  their  swords,  into  apparent  death, 
Holding  alway  the  chief  street  of  the  town, 
Covered  with  the  close  shadows  of  the  night." 

1  Strictly,  the  first  into  a  British  vernacular  is  that  of  the 
Scottish  poet,  Gavin  Douglas,  also  of  the  JEneid,  1513. 


44  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

The  line  is  the  five-foot  or  ten-syllable  line  of  what 
is  called  "  heroic  verse  "-  —the  line  used  by  Chaucer 
in  his  Prologue  and  most  of  his  tales.  Like 
Milton,  Surrey  deplored  rhyme  as  the  invention  of 
a  barbarous  age,  and  no  doubt  he  would  have 
rejoiced  to  go  further  and  banish  accent  as  well  as 
rhymed  endings.  That,  however,  was  not  to  be, 
though  in  the  best  blank  verse  of  a  later  time  accent 
and  quantity  both  have  their  share  in  the  effect. 
The  instrument  he  forged  passed  into  the  hands 
of  the  dramatists :  Marlowe  perfected  its  rhythm, 
Shakespeare  broke  its  monotony  and  varied  its 
cadences  by  altering  the  spacing  of  the  accents, 
and  occasionally  by  adding  an  extra  unaccented 
syllable.  It  came  back  from  the  drama  to  poetry 
with  Milton.  His  blindness  and  the  necessity 
under  which  it  laid  him  of  keeping  in  his  head 
long  stretches  of  verse  at  one  ^time,  because  he 
could  not  look  back  to  see  what  he  had  written, 
probably  helped  his  naturally  quick  and  delicate 
sense  of  cadence  to  vary  the  pauses,  so  that  a 
variety  of  accent  and  interval  might  replace  the 
valuable  aid  to  memory  which  he  put  aside  in 
putting  aside  rhyme.  Perhaps  it  is  to  two  acci- 
dents, the  accident  by  which  blank  verse  as  the 
medium  of  the  actor  had  to  be  retained  easily  in 
the  memory,  and  the  accident  of  Milton's  blindness, 
that  must  be  laid  the  credit  of  more  than  a  little 
of  the  richness  of  rhythm  of  this,  the  chief  and 
greatest  instrument  of  English  verse. 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY   AND   PROSE        45 

The  imitation  of  Chaucerian  Italian  and  French 
forms  which  Wyatt  and  Surrey  began,  was  con- 
tinued by  a  host  of  younger  amateurs  of  poetry.  * 
The  first  and  best  of  them  was  Thomas  Sackville 
(Lord  Buckhurst),  who  towards  the  end  of  his  life 
(he  outlived  the  Queen)  was  to  become  Lord  High 
Treasurer.  His  literary  work  was  done  before  he 
entered  public  life,  and  though  it  is  small  in 
compass  and  consists  indeed  of  no  more  than  two 
poems,  one  narrative  and  the  other  dramatic,  in 
its  way  it  helped  to  make  an  epoch.  Gorboduc, 
the  first  blank  verse  tragedy  in  our  language,  we 
shall  see  later  when  we  come  to  deal  with  the 
drama.  Sackville's  other  poem  is  the  Induction  y 
to  the  Mirror  for  Magistrates,  a  composite  poem 
modelled  on  Lydgate's  Pall  of  Princes  and  / 
ultimately  on  Boccaccio,  which  was  designed  to  be 
for  rulers  and  statesmen  both  a  warning  and  a 
glass  in  which  they  should  see  themselves.  Sackville 
designed  the  work,  but  after  he  had  done  the  intro- 
ductory portion  and  one  of  the  tales,  he  left  the 
completion  of  it  to  inferior  hands,  and  strangely, 
the  book  was  first  published  without  his  part  of  it ; 
it  was  not  till  four  years  after,  in  1563,  that  the 
Induction  appeared.  The  scheme  of  the  book, 
based  on  Vergil  and  Dante,  was  that  the  poet 
should  descend  into  hell  and  interview  the  person- 
ages, who  would  tell  their  own  story;  Sackville's 
portion  of  it  describes  the  descent.  Since  Chaucer, 
two  hundred  years  back,  nothing  comparable  had 


46  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

been  produced  in  English  verse,  nor  can  it  be  truly 
said  that  it  is  in  strength  and  power  in  any  way 
inferior  to  Spenser  himself.  The  following  stanza 
will  give  the  reader  a  taste  of  its  quality  :— 

"  Crookbacked  he  was,  tooth-shaken  and  blear-eyed  ; 
Went  on  three  feet,  and  sometimes  crept  on  four ; 
With  old  lame  bones,  that  rattled  by  his  side ; 
His  scalp  all  piled,  and  he  with  eld  forelore, 
His  withered  fist  still  knocking  at  death's  door ; 
Fumbling  and  drivelling  as  he  draws  his  breath ; 
For  brief,  the  shape  and  messenger  of  death." 

The  Induction  runs  to  eighty  stanzas,  and  it 
maintains  to  the  end  the  level  at  which  it  began. 
When  it  ended  Sackville  put  down  his  pen,  and,  so 
far  as  we  know,  throughout  his  long  life  never,  save 
to  sign  a  state  paper,  took  it  up  again. 

Sackville  followed  Chaucer ;  his  contemporaries 
busied  themselves  with  Petrarch  and  his  school. 
Laborious  research  has  found  a  Continental  original 
for  almost  every  great  poem  of  the  time,  and  for 
very  many  forgotten  ones  as  well.  It  is  easy  for 
the  student  engaged  in  this  kind  of  literary  explora- 
tion to  exaggerate  the  importance  of  what  he  finds, 
and  of  late  years  criticism,  written  mainly  by  these 
explorers,  has  tended  to  assume  that  since  it  can 
be  found  that  Sidney,  and  Daniel,  and  Watson, 
and  all  the  other  writers  of  mythological  poetry 
and  sonnet  sequences  took  their  ideas  and  their 
phrases  from  foreign  poetry,  their  work  is  therefore 
to  be  classed  merely  as  imitative  literary  exercise, 
that  it  is  frigid,  that  it  contains  or  conveys  no  real 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY   AND   PROSE        47 

feeling,   and    that    except   in   the   secondary   and 
derived  sense,  it  is  not  really  lyrical  at  all.    Petrarch, 
they  will  tell  you,  may  have  felt  deeply  and  sincerely 
about   Laura,   but   when    Sidney   uses   Petrarch's 
imagery  and  even  translates  his  words  in  order  to 
express  his  feelings  for  Stella,  he  is  only  a  plagiarist 
and  not  a  lover,  and  the  passion  for   Lady  Rich 
which  is  supposed   to   have  inspired   his   sonnets, 
nothing  more  than  a  not   too  seriously  intended 
trick  to  add  the  excitement  of  a  transcript  of  real 
emotion  to  what  was  really  an  academic  exercise. 
If  that  were  indeed  so,  then  Elizabethan  poetry  is 
a  very  much  lesser  and  meaner   thing  than  later 
ages  have  thought  it.     But  is  it  so  ?     Let  us  look 
into  the  matter  a  little  more  closely.     The  unit  of 
all  ordinary  kinds  of  writing  is  the  word,  and  one 
is  not  commonly  quarrelled  with  for  using  words 
that  have  belonged  to  other  people.     But  the  unit 
of  the  lyric,  like  the  unit  of  spoken  conversation,  is 
not  the  word  but  the  phrase.     Now  in  daily  human 
intercourse  the  use,  which  is  universal  and  habitual, 
of  set  forms  and  phrases  of  talk  is  not  commonly 
supposed  to  detract  from  or  destroy  sincerity.     In 
the   crises   indeed   of    emotion   it   must   be   most 
people's   experience   that   the  natural  speech  that 
rises  unbidden  and  easiest  to  the  lips  is  something 
quite  familiar  and  commonplace,  some  form  which 
the  accumulated  experience  of  many  generations 
of  separate  people  has  found  best  for  such  circum- 
stances or  such  an  occasion.     The  lyric  is  in  the 


48  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

position  of  conversation  at  such  a  heightened  and 
emotional  moment.  It  is  the  speech  of  deep 
feeling,  that  must  be  articulate  or  choke,  and  it 
falls  naturally  and  inevitably  into  some  form  which 
accumulated  passionate  moments  have  created  and 
fixed.  The  course  of  emotional  experiences  differs 
very  little  from  age  to  age  and  from  individual  to 
individual,  and  so  the  same  phrases  may  be  used 
quite  sincerely  and  naturally  as  the  direct  expression 
of  feeling  at  its  highest  point  by  men  apart  in 
country,  circumstances,  or  time.  This  is  not  to 
say  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  originality;  a 
poet  is  a  poet  first  and  most  of  all  because  he 
discovers  truths  that  have  been  known  for  ages,  as 
things  that  are  fresh  and  new  and  vital  for  himself. 
He  must  speak  of  them  in  language  that  has  been 
used  by  other  men  just  because  they  are  known 
truths,  but  he  will  use  that  language  in  a  new 
way,  and  with  a  new  significance,  and  it  is  just  in 
proportion  to  the  freshness,  and  the  air  of  personal 
conviction  and  sincerity  which  he  imparts  to  it, 
that  he  is  great. 

The  point  at  issue  bears  very  directly  on  the 
work  of  Sir  Philip  Sidney.  In  the  course  of  the 
history  of  English  letters  certain  authors  disengage 
themselves  who  have  more  than  a  merely  literary 
position:  they  are  symbolic  of  the  whole  age  in 
which  they  live,  its  life  and  action,  its  thoughts  and 
ideals,  as  well  as  its  mere  modes  of  writing.  There 
are  not  many  of  them,  and  they  could  be  easily 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY   AND   PROSE        49 

numbered:  Addison,  perhaps,  certainly Dr  Johnson, 
certainly  Byron,  and  in  the  later  age  probably 
Tennyson.  But  the  greatest  of  them  all  is  Sir 
Philip  Sidney :  his  symbolical  relation  to  the  time 
in  which  he  lived  was  realized  by  his  contemporaries, 
and  it  has  been  a  commonplace  of  history  and 
criticism  ever  since.  Elizabeth  called  him  one  of 
the  jewels  of  her  crown,  and  at  the  age  of  twenty- 
three,  so  fast  did  genius  ripen  in  that  summer-time 
of  the  Renaissance,  William  the  Silent  could  speak 
of  him  as  "  one  of  the  ripest  statesmen  of  the  age." 
He  travelled  widely  in  Europe,  knew  many 
languages,  and  dreamed  of  adventure  in  America 
and  on  the  high  seas.  In  a  court  of  brilliant  figures, 
his  was  the  most  dazzling,  and  his  death  at  Zutphen 
only  served  to  intensify  the  halo  of  romance  which 
had  gathered  round  his  name.  So  far  as  we  can 
guess,  all  his  literary  work  was  done  in  four  short 
years,  1578-1582  ;  but  its  bulk  is  such  that  even  a 
man  of  his  burning  vitality  cannot  have  been  long 
idle  from  it.  In  prose  he  wrote  the  Arcadia  and 
the  Apology  for  Poetry,  the  one  the  beginning  of 
a  new  kind  of  imaginative  writing,  and  the  other 
the  first  of  the  series  of  those  rare  and  precious 
commentaries  on  their  own  art  which  some  of  our 
English  poets  have  left  us.  To  it  and  the  Arcadia 
we  shall  have  to  return  later  in  this  chapter.  It  is 
his  other  great  work,  the  sequence  of  sonnets  en- 
titled Astrophel  and  Stella,  which  concerns  us  here. 
They  celebrate  the  history  of  his  love  for  Penelope 


50  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Devereux,  sister  of  the  Earl  of  Essex,  a  love  brought 
to  disaster  by  the  intervention  of  Queen  Elizabeth 
with  whom  he  had  quarrelled.  As  poetry,  they 
mark  an  epoch.  They  are  the  first  direct  expression 
of  an  intimate  and  personal  experience  in  English 
literature,  struck  off  in  the  white  heat  of  passion, 
and  though  they  are  coloured  at  times  with  that 
over- fantastic  imagery  which  is  at  once  a  character- 
istic fault  and  excellence  of  the  writing  of  the  time, 
they  never  lose  the  one  merit  above  all  others  of 
lyric  poetry,  the  merit  of  sincerity.  The  note  is 
struck  with  certainty  and  power  in  the  first  sonnet 
of  the  series : — 

"  Loving  in  truth,  and  fain  in  verse  my  love  to  show, 
That  she,  dear  she,  might  take  some  pleasure  of  my 

pain, — 
Pleasure  might  cause  her  read,  reading  might  make  her 

know, — 

Knowledge  might  pity  win,  and  pity  grace  obtain, — 
I  sought  fit  words  to  paint  the  blackest  face  of  woe, 
Studying  inventions  fine  her  wits  to  entertain ; 
Oft  turning  others'  leaves  to  see  if  thence  would  flow 
Some  fresh  and  fruitful  flower  upon  my  sunburned  brain. 
But  words  came  halting  forth  .  .  . 
Biting  my  truant  pen,  beating  myself  for  spite. 
'  Fool,1  said  my  muse  to  me,  *  look  in  thy  heart  and  write.1 " 

And  though  he  turned  others'  leaves,  it  was  quite 
truly  looking  in  his  heart  that  he  wrote.  He 
analyses  the  sequence  of  his  feelings  with  a  vivid- 
ness and  minuteness  which  assure  us  of  their  truth. 
All  that  he  tells  is  the  fruit  of  experience,  dearly 
bought : 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY   AND   PROSE        51 

"  Desire !  desire  !  I  have  too  dearly  bought 
With  price  of  mangled  mind  thy  worthless  ware. 
Too  long,  too  long !  asleep  thou  hast  me  brought, 
Who  shouldst  my  mind  to  higher  things  prepare  " ; 

and  earlier  in  the  sequence — 

"  I  now  have  learned  love  right,  and  learned  even  so 
As  those  that  being  poisoned  poison  know." 

In  the  last  two  sonnets,  with  crowning  truth  and 
pathos  he  renounces  earthly  love,  which  reaches  but 
to  dust,  and  which  because  it  fades  brings  but 
fading  pleasure : 

"  Then  farewell,  world  !     Thy  uttermost  I  see. 
Eternal  love,  maintain  thy  life  in  me." 

The  sonnets  were  published  after  Sidney's  death, 
and  it  is  certain  that  like  Shakespeare's  they  were 
never  intended  for  publication  at  all.  The  point 
is  important  because  it  helps  to  vindicate  Sidney's 
sincerity,  but  were  any  vindication  needed  another 
more  certain  might  be  found.  The  Arcadia  is 
strewn  with  love  songs  and  sonnets,  the  exercises 
solely  of  the  literary  imagination.  Let  anyone  who 
wishes  to  gauge  the  sincerity  of  the  impulse  of  the 
Stella  sequence  compare  any  of  the  poems  in  it 
with  those  in  the  romance.  One  thing  they  plainly 
show :  had  Sidney  lived  he  would  have  done  things 
which  must  have  set  him  on  a  plane  not  inferior  to 
that  of  Spenser  himself,  and  he  would  have  had 
his  hand,  one  knows  not  to  what  great  purpose,  in 
the  shaping  of  English  poetry.  When  Zutphen  cut 
short  his  career,  nothing  of  Spenser  had  appeared 
save  the  Shepherd's  Calendar ;  Shakespeare  was 


52  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

known  only  as  the  author  of  Venus  and  Adonis ; 
the  drama  had  not  shouldered  itself  to  the  forefront 
of  letters.  Would  Sidney  have  turned  his  hand  to 
writing  in  an  art  which  his  class  only  patronized  ? 

With  Sidney  literature  was  an  avocation,  con- 
stantly indulged  in,  but  outside  the  main  business 
of  his  life ;  with  Edmund  Spenser  public  life  and 
affairs  were  subservient  to  an  overmastering  poetic 
impulse.  He  did  his  best  to  carve  out  a  career  for 
himself  like  other  young  men  of  his  time,  followed 
the  fortunes  of  the  Earl  of  Leicester,  sought 
desperately  and  unavailingly  the  favour  of  the 
Queen,  and  ultimately  accepted  a  place  in  her 
service  in  Ireland,  which  meant  banishment  as 
virtually  as  a  place  in  India  would  to-day.  Hence- 
forward his  visits  to  London  and  the  Court  were 
few ;  sometimes  a  lover  of  travel  would  visit  him 
in  his  house  in  Ireland  as  Raleigh  did,  but  for  the 
most  he  was  left  alone.  It  was  in  this  atmosphere 
of  loneliness  and  separation,  hostile  tribes  pinning 
him  in  on  every  side,  murder  lurking  in  the  woods 
and  marshes  round  him,  that  he  composed  his 
greatest  work.  In  it  at  last  he  died,  on  the  heels 
of  a  sudden  rising  in  which  his  house  was  burnt 
and  his  lands  overrun  by  the  wild  Irish  whom  the 
tyranny  of  the  English  planters  had  driven  to 
vengeance.  Spenser  was  not  without  interest  in 
his  public  duties ;  his  View  of  the  State  of  Ireland 
shows  that.  But  it  shows,  too,  that  he  brought  to 
them  singularly  little  sympathy  or  imagination. 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY   AND  PROSE        53 

Throughout  his  tone  is  that  of  an  unimaginative 
kind  of  English  officialdom ;  rigid  subjection  and 
in  the  last  resort  massacre  are  the  remedies  he  would 
apply  to  Irish  discontent.  He  would  be  a  fine 
text — which  might  perhaps  be  enforced  by  modern 
examples — for  a  discourse  on  the  evil  effects  of 
immersion  in  the  government  of  a  subject  race 
upon  men  of  letters.  No  man  of  action  perhaps 
can  be  so  consistently  and  cynically  an  advocate  of 
tyranny  as  your  man  of  letters.  Spenser,  of  course, 
had  his  excuses ;  the  problem  of  Ireland  was  new 
and  it  was  something  remote  and  difficult ;  in  all 
but  the  mere  distance  for  travel,  Dublin  was  as  far 
from  London  as  Bombay  is  to-day.  But  to  him 
and  his  like  we  must  lay  down  partly  the  fact  that 
to-day  we  have  still  an  Irish  problem. 

But  though  fate  and  the  necessity  of  a  livelihood 
drove  him  to  Ireland  and  the  life  of  a  colonist, 
poetry  was  his  main  business.  He  had  been  the 
centre  of  a  brilliant  set  at  Cambridge,  one  of  those 
coteries  whose  fame,  if  they  are  brilliant  and 
vivacious  enough  and  have  enough  self-confidence, 
penetrates  to  the  outer  world  before  they  leave 
the  University.  The  thing  happens  in  our  own 
day,  as  the  case  of  Oscar  Wilde  is  witness;  it 
happened  in  the  case  of  Spenser ;  and  when  he  and 
his  friends  Gabriel  Harvey  and  Edward  Kirke 
came  "  down  "  it  was  to  immediate  fame  amongst 
amateurs  of  the  arts.  They  corresponded  with 
each  other  about  literary  matters,  and  Harvey 


64  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

published  his  part  of  the  correspondence ;  they 
played,  like  Du  Bellay  in  France,  with  the  idea  of 
writing  English  verse  in  the  quantitative  measures 
of  classical  poetry;  Spenser  had  a  love  affair  in 
Yorkshire  and  wrote  poetry  about  it,  letting  just 
enough  be  known  to  stimulate  the  imagination  of 
the  public.  They  tried  their  hands  at  everything, 
imitated  everything,  and  in  all  were  brilliant, 
sparkling,  and  decorative ;  they  got  a  kind  of 
entrance  to  the  circle  of  the  Court.  Then  Spenser 
published  his  Shepherd's  Calendar,  a  series  of 
pastoral  eclogues  for  every  month  of  the  year, 
after  a  manner  taken  from  French  and  Italian 
pastoral  writers,  but  coming  ultimately  from 
Vergil,  and  Edward  Kirke  furnished  it  with  an 
elaborate  prose  commentary.  Spenser  took  the 
same  liberties  with  the  pastoral  form  as  did  Vergil 
himself;  that  is  to  say,  he  used  it  as  a  vehicle  for 
satire  and  allegory,  made  it  carry  political  and 
social  allusions,  and  planted  in  it  references  to  his 
friends.  By  its  publication  Spenser  became  the 
first  poet  of  the  day.  It  was  followed  by  some  of 
his  finest  and  most  beautiful  things  —  by  the 
Platonic  hymns,  by  the  Amoretti,  a  series  of 
sonnets  inspired  by  his  love  for  his  wife;  by  the 
Epithalamium,  on  the  occasion  of  his  marriage  to 
her ;  by  Mother  Hubbards  Tale,  a  satire  written 
when  despair  at  the  coldness  of  the  Queen  and  the 
enmity  of  Burleigh  was  beginning  to  take  hold  on 
the  poet,  and  endowed  with  a  plainness  and  vigour 


EDMUND  SPENSER. 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY   AND   PROSE         55 

foreign  to  most  of  his  other  work;  and  then  by 
The  Faerie  Queen. 

The  poets  of  the  Renaissance  were  not  afraid  of 
big  things  ;  every  one  of  them  had  in  his  mind  as 
the  goal  of  poetic  endeavour  the  idea  of  the  heroic 
poem,  aimed  at  doing  for  his  own  country  what 
Vergil  had  intended  to  do  for  Rome  in  the  ^Eneid, 
to  celebrate  it — its  origin,  its  prowess,  its  greatness, 
and  the  causes  of  it — in  epic  verse.  Milton,  three- 
quarters  of  a  century  later,  turned  over  in  his  mind 
the  plan  of  an  English  epic  on  the  wars  of  Arthur, 
and  when  he  left  it,  it  was  only  to  forsake  the  sing- 
ing of  English  origins  for  the  more  ultimate  theme 
of  the  origins  of  mankind.  Spenser  designed  to 
celebrate  the  character,  the  qualities,  and  the 
training  of  the  English  gentleman.  And  because 
poetry,  unlike  philosophy,  cannot  deal  with  abstrac- 
tions but  must  be  vivid  and  concrete,  he  was  forced 
to  embody  his  virtues  and  foes  to  virtue  and  to 
use  the  way  of  allegory.  His  outward  plan,  with 
its  knights  and  dragons  and  desperate  adventures, 
he  procured  from  Ariosto.  As  for  the  use  of 
allegory,  it  was  one  of  the  discoveries  of  the  Middle 
Ages  which  the  Renaissance  condescended  to 
retain,  Spenser  elaborated  it  beyond  the  wildest 
dreams  of  those  students  of  Holy  Writ  who  had 
first  conceived  it.  His  stories  were  to  be  interesting 
in  themselves  as  tales  of  adventure,  but  within 
them  they  were  to  conceal  an  intricate  treatment 
of  the  conflict  of  truth  and  falsehood  in  morals 


56  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

and  religion.  A  character  might  typify  at  once 
Protestantism  and  England  and  Elizabeth  and 
chastity  and  half  the  cardinal  virtues,  and  it  would 
have  all  the  while  the  objective  interest  attaching 
to  it  as  part  of  a  story  of  adventure.  All  this  must 
have  made  the  poem  difficult  enough.  Spenser's 
manner  of  writing  it  made  it  worse  still.  One  is 
familiar  with  the  type  of  novel  which  only  explains 
itself  when  the  last  chapter  is  reached — Stevenson's 
Wrecker  is  an  example.  The  Faerie  Queen  was 
designed  on  somewhat  the  same  plan.  The  last 
section  was  to  relate  and  explain  the  unrelated  and 
unexplained  books  which  made  up  the  poem,  and 
at  the  court  to  which  the  separate  knights  of  the 
separate  books — the  Red  Cross  Knight  and  the 
rest — were  to  bring  the  fruit  of  their  adventures, 
everything  was  to  be  made  clear.  Spenser  did  not 
live  to  finish  his  work  ;  The  Faerie  Queen,  like  the 
^Eneid,  is  an  uncompleted  poem,  and  it  is  only 
from  a  prefatory  letter  to  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  issued 
with  the  second  published  section  that  we  know 
what  the  poem  was  intended  to  be.  Had  Spenser 
not  published  this  explanation,  it  is  impossible  that 
anybody,  even  the  acutest-minded  German  pro- 
fessor, could  have  guessed. 

The  poem,  as  we  have  seen,  was  composed  in 
Ireland,  in  the  solitude  of  a  colonist's  plantation, 
and  the  author  was  shut  off  from  his  fellows  while 
he  wrote.  The  influence  of  his  surroundings  is 
visible  in  the  writing.  The  elaboration  of  the 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY   AND   PROSE        57 

theme  would  have  been  impossible,  or  at  least 
very  unlikely,  if  its  author  had  not  been  thrown  in 
on  himself  during  its  composition.  Its  intricacy 
and  involution  is  the  product  of  an  over-concentra- 
tion born  of  empty  surroundings.  It  lacks  vigour 
and  rapidity ;  it  winds  itself  into  itself.  The 
influence  of  Ireland,  too,  is  visible  in  its  landscapes, 
in  its  description  of  bogs  and  desolation,  of  dark 
forests  in  which  lurk  savages  ready  to  spring  out 
on  those  who  are  rash  enough  to  wander  within 
their  confines.  All  the  scenery  in  it  which  is  not 
imaginary  is  Irish  and  not  English  scenery.  But 
the  imaginary  scenery  comes  straight  out  of  the 
land  of  pure  poetry. 

Its  reception  in  England  and  at  the  Court  was 
enthusiastic.  Men  and  women  read  it  eagerly  and 
longed  for  the  next  section  as  our  grandfathers 
longed  for  the  next  section  of  Pickwick.  They 
really  liked  it,  really  loved  the  intricacy  and  luxuri- 
ousness  of  it,  the  heavy  exotic  language,  the  thickly 
painted  descriptions,  the  languorous  melody  of  the 
verse.  Mainly,  perhaps,  that  was  so  because  they 
were  all  either  in  wish  or  in  deed  poets  themselves. 
Spenser  has  always  been  "  the  poet's  poet."  Some 
of  them  stole  from  him  and  were  never  caught  in 
the  stealing.  One  remembers  what  came  from  the 
following  stanza  in  the  second  book  of  The  Faerie 
Queen: — 

"  So  passeth,  in  the  passing  of  a  day 
Of  mortal  life,  the  leaf,  the  bud,  the  flower ; 


58  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

No  more  doth  flourish  after  first  decay, 

That  erst  was  sought  to  deck  both  bed  and  bower 

Of  many  a  lady,  and  many  a  paramour. 

Gather,  therefore,  the  Rose  whilst  yet  is  prime, 

For  soon  comes  age  that  will  her  pride  deflower ; 

Gather  the  Rose  of  love  whilst  yet  is  time, 

Whilst  loving  thou  mayst  loved  be  with  equal  crime." 

Milton  loved  him ;  so  did  Dryden,  who  said  that 
Milton  confessed  to  him  that  Spenser  was  "  his 
original,"  a  statement  which  has  been  pronounced 
incredible,  but  is,  in  truth,  perfectly  comprehensible, 
and  most  likely  true.  Pope  admired  him,  and  was 
scornful  when  Addison  hinted  dispraise.  Keats 
learned  from  him  the  best  part  of  his  music.  You 
can  trace  echoes  of  him  in  Mr  Yeats.  What  is  it 
that  gives  him  this  hold  on  his  peers  ?  Well,  in 
the  first  place  his  defects  do  not  detract  from  his 
purely  poetic  qualities.  The  story  is  impossibly 
told,  but  that  will  only  worry  those  who  are 
looking  for  a  story.  The  allegory  is  hopelessly 
difficult ;  but  as  Hazlitt  said,  "  the  allegory  will 
not  bite  you  "  ;  you  can  let  it  alone.  The  crude- 
ness  and  bigotry  of  Spenser's  dealings  with 
Catholicism,  which  are  ridiculous  when  he  pictures 
the  monster  Error  vomiting  books  and  pamphlets, 
and  disgusting  when  he  draws  Mary  Queen  of 
Scots,  do  not  hinder  the  pleasure  of  those  who 
read  him  for  his  language  and  his  art.  He  is  great 
for  other  reasons  than  these.  First  because  of  the 
extraordinary  smoothness  and  melody  of  his  verse 
and  the  richness  of  his  language — a  golden  diction 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY    AND   PROSE         59 

that  he  drew  from  every  source — new  words,  old 
words,  obsolete  words — such  a  mixture  that  the 
purist  Ben  Jonson  remarked  acidly  that  he  wrote 
no  language  at  all.  Secondly  because  of  the  pro- 
fusion of  his  imagery,  and  the  extraordinarily  keen 
sense  for  beauty  and  sweetness  that  went  to  its 
making.  In  an  age  of  golden  language  and  gallant 
imagery  his  was  the  most  golden  and  the  most 
gallant.  And  the  language  of  poetry  in  England 
is  richer  and  more  varied  than  that  in  any  other 
country  in  Europe  to-day,  because  of  what  he  did. 

(3) 

Elizabethan  prose  brings  us  face  to  face  with  a 
difficulty  which  has  to  be  met  by  every  student  of 
literature.  Does  the  word  "literature"  cover  every 
kind  of  writing  ?  Ought  we  to  include  in  it  writ- 
ing that  aims  merely  at  instruction  or  is  merely 
journey-work,  as  well  as  writing  that  has  an  artistic 
intention,  or  writing  that,  whether  its  author  knew 
it  or  no,  is  artistic  in  its  result  ?  Of  course  such  a 
question  causes  us  no  sort  of  difficulty  when  it 
concerns  itself  only  with  what  is  being  published 
to-day.  We  know  very  well  that  some  things  are 
literature  and  some  merely  journalism ;  that  of 
novels,  for  instance,  some  deliberately  intend  to  be 
works  of  art  and  others  only  to  meet  a  passing 
desire  for  amusement  or  mental  occupation.  We 
know  that  most  books  serve  or  attempt  to  serve 
only  a  useful  and  not  a  literary  purpose.  But  in 


60  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

reading  the  books  of  three  centuries  ago,  uncon- 
sciously one's  point  of  view  shifts.  Antiquity 
gilds  journey-work ;  remoteness  and  quaintness  of 
phrasing  lend  a  kind  of  distinction  to  what  are 
simply  pamphlets  or  text-books  that  have  been 
preserved  by  accident  from  the  ephemeralness 
which  was  the  common  lot  of  hundreds  of  their 
fellows.  One  comes  to  regard  as  literature  things 
that  had  no  kind  of  literary  value  for  their  first 
audiences ;  to  apply  the  same  seriousness  of  judg- 
ment and  the  same  tests  to  the  pamphlets  of  Nash 
and  Dekker  as  to  the  prose  of  Sidney  and  Bacon. 
One  loses,  in  fact,  that  power  to  distinguish  the 
important  from  the  trivial  which  is  one  of  the 
functions  of  a  sound  literary  taste.  Now,  a  study 
of  the  minor  writing  of  the  past  is,  of  course, 
well  worth  a  reader's  pains.  Pamphlets,  chronicle 
histories,  text-books  and  the  like  have  an  historical 
importance  ;  they  give  us  glimpses  of  the  manners 
and  habits  and  modes  of  thought  of  the  day.  They 
tell  us  more  about  the  outward  show  of  life  than 
do  the  greater  books.  If  you  are  interested  in 
social  history,  they  are  the  very  thing.  But  the 
student  of  literature  ought  to  beware  of  them,  nor 
ought  he  to  touch  them  till  he  is  familiar  with  the 
big  and  lasting  things.  A  man  does  not  possess 
English  literature  if  he  knows  what  Dekker  tells  of 
The  Seven  Deadly  Sins  of  London  and  does  not  know 
The  Faerie  Queen.  Though  the  wide  and  curious 
interest  of  the  Romantic  critics  of  the  nineteenth 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY   AND   PROSE        61 

century  found  and  illumined  the  byways  of  Eliza- 
bethan writing,  the  safest  method  of  approach  is 
the  method  of  their  predecessors — to  keep  hold  on 
common  sense,  to  look  at  literature,  not  historically 
as  through  the  wrong  end  of  a  telescope,  but  closely 
and  without  a  sense  of  intervening  time,  to  know 
the  best — the  "  classic  " — and  study  it  before  the 
minor  things. 

In  Elizabeth's  reign,  prose  became  for  the  first 
time,  with  cheapened  printing,  the  common  vehicle 
of  amusement  and  information,  and  the  books  that 
remain  to  us  cover  many  departments  of  writing. 
There  are  the  pamphleteers,  of  whom  Nash  is  the 
ablest,  the  most  productive  and  the  most  brilliant. 
There  are  the  historians  who  set  down  for  us  for 
the  first  time  what  they  knew  of  the  earlier  history 
of  England,  Holinshed,  Hall  and  the  rest.  There 
are  the  writers,  like  Harrison  and  Stubbs,  who 
described  the  England  of  their  own  day.  There 
are  the  novelists  who  translated  stories  mainly  from 
Italian  sources,  like  Painter  and  Fenton  and  Lodge. 
Finally,  there  are  the  narratives  of  those  voyages 
which  gave  the  age  its  essential  romantic  back- 
ground and  the  air  from  which  infuses  its  whole 
literature,  set  forth  by  the  voyagers  themselves. 
The  two  great  collections  of  these,  Hakluyt's  and 
Purchas's,  were  among  the  most  popular  books  of 
the  time.  To  them  indeed  we  must  look  for  the 
first  beginnings  of  our  modern  English  prose  and 
some  of  its  finest  passages.  The  writers,  as  often 


62  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

as  not,  were  otherwise  utterly  unknown:  ships' 
pursers,  supercargoes,  and  the  like ;  men  without 
any  special  literary  craft  or  training,  whose  style 
is  great  largely  because  of  the  greatness  of  their 
subject  and  because  they  had  no  rhetorical  artifices 
to  stand  between  them  and  the  plain  and  direct 
telling  of  a  stirring  tale.  The  influence  of  their 
writing  not  only  helped  English  prose  towards  the 
gravity  and  simplicity  which  it  attained  in  the 
seventeenth  century;  it  gave  a  basis  for  a  large 
part  of  the  philosophical  literature  which  is  so  char- 
acteristic a  product  of  Jacobean  England.  On  the 
reports  brought  home  by  these  voyagers  and  printed 
in  their  narratives  were  founded  in  part  those 
conceptions  of  the  conditions  of  the  "  natural  man  " 
which  took  such  a  prominent  place  in  the  work  of 
Hobbes  and  Locke.  Hobbes'  description  of  the 
life  of  nature  as  "  nasty,  solitary,  brutish  and  short," 
and  Locke's  theories  of  civil  government,  and 
abroad,  the  work  of  Montesquieu  and  Rousseau, 
all  took  as  the  basis  of  their  theories  the  observa- 
tions of  the  men  of  travel.  Locke  himself  is  the 
best  example  of  the  closeness  of  this  alliance.  He 
was  a  diligent  student  of  the  text  of  the  voyagers, 
and  himself  edited  out  of  Purchas  the  best  collec- 
tion of  them  current  in  his  day. 

All  these  people  wrote  without  knowing  that 
they  wrote  well.  Of  authors  as  conscious  of  a 
literary  intention  as  the  poets  were,  there  are  only 
two,  Sidney  and  Lyly ;  and  of  authors  who,  though 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY   AND   PROSE        63 

their  first  aim  was  hardly  an  artistic  one,  achieved 
an  artistic  result,  only  Bacon,  Hooker,  and  the 
translators  of  the  Bible.  The  Authorized  Version 
of  the  Bible,  and  most  of  the  work  of  Bacon,  belong 
strictly  not  to  the  reign  of  Elizabeth  but  to  that  of 
James,  and  we  shall  have  to  look  at  it  when  we 
come  to  discuss  the  seventeenth  century.  Hooker, 
in  his  book  on  Ecclesiastical  Polity  (an  endeavour 
to  set  forth  the  grounds  of  orthodox  Anglicanism), 
employed  a  fine  moderation  which  has  permanently 
influenced  the  study  of  the  subject,  and  a  generous, 
flowing,  melodious  style  which  has  attracted  many 
writers  since  and  is  familiar  to  us  to-day  in  the 
effect  of  it  on  Ruskin  in  his  earlier  works.  Lyly 
and  Sidney  are  worth  looking  at  more  closely. 

The  age  was  intoxicated  with  language.  It  went 
mad  of  a  mere  delight  in  words.  Its  writers  were 
using  a  new  tongue,  for  English  was  enriched 
beyond  all  recognition  with  borrowings  from  the 
ancient  authors;  £nd  like  all  artists  who  become 
possessed  of  a  new  medium,  they  used  it  to  excess. 
Rhetoric  was  the  main  subject  of  instruction  in  the 
schools.  It  was  the  habit  of  the  rhetoricians  to 
choose  some  subject  for  declamation  and  to  encour- 
age their  pupils  to  set  round  it  embellishments  and 
decorations,  which  cared  rather  less  for  enforcing 
an  argument  than  for  the  mere  delight  of  language 
for  language'  sake.  The  early  Elizabethans'  use  of 
the  new  prose  was  very  like  the  use  that  educated 
Indians  make  of  English  to-day.  It  is  not  that 


64  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

these  write  it  incorrectly,  but  only  that  they  write 
too  richly.  And  just  as  fuller  use  and  knowledge 
teaches  them  spareness  and  economy  and  gives 
their  writing  simplicity  and  vigour,  so  seventeenth- 
century  practice  taught  Englishmen  to  write  a 
more  direct  and  undecorated  style  and  gave  us  the 
smooth,  simple,  and  vigorous  writing  of  Dryden — 
the  first  really  modern  English  prose.  But  the 
Elizabethans  loved  gaudier  methods;  they  liked 
highly  decorative  modes  of  expression,  in  prose  no 
less  than  in  verse.  The  first  author  to  give  them 
these  things  was  John  Lyly,  whose  book  Euphues 
(1579-80)  was  for  the  ten  or  so  years  following  its 
publication  a  fashionable  craze  that  infected  all 
society  and  gave  its  name  to  a  peculiar  and  highly 
artificial  style  of  writing  that  coloured  the  work 
of  hosts  of  obscure  and  forgotten  followers.  Lyly 
wrote  other  things  ;  his  comedies  may  have  taught 
Shakespeare  the  trick  of  Loves  Labour s  Lost ;  he 
attempted  a  sequel  of  his  most  famous  work  with 
better  success  than  commonly  attends  sequels ;  but 
for  us  and  for  his  own  generation  he  is  the  author 
of  one  book.  Everybody  read  it,  everybody  copied 
it.  The  maxims  and  sentences  of  advice  for 
gentlemen  which  it  contained  were  quoted  and 
admired  in  the  Court,  where  the  author,  though  he 
never  attained  the  lucrative  position  he  hoped  for, 
did  what  flattery  could  do  to  make  a  name  for 
himself.  The  name  "  Euphuism  "  became  a  current 
description  of  an  artificial  way  of  using  words  that 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY   AND   PROSE        65 

overflowed  out  of  writing  into  speech  and  was  in 
the  mouths,  while  the  vogue  lasted,  of  everybody 
who  was  anybody  in  the  circle  that  fluttered  round 
the  Queen. 

The  style  of  Euphues  was  parodied  by  Shake- 
speare, and  many  attempts  have  been  made  to 
imitate  it  since.  Most  of  them  are  inaccurate — 
Sir  Walter  Scott's  wild  attempt  the  most  inaccurate 
of  all.  They  fail  because  their  authors  have 
imagined  that  "  Euphuism "  is  simply  a  highly 
artificial  and  "flowery"  way  of  talking.  As  a 
matter  of  fact  it  is  directly  based  on  the  precepts 
of  the  handbooks  on  rhetoric  current  in  the  schools  ; 
Lyly  only  elaborated  and  made  more  precise  tricks 
of  phrase  and  writing  which  had  been  the  exercises 
of  his  youth.  Its  fantastic  delight  in  exuberance 
of  figure  and  sound  owes  its  inspiration  in  its  form 
ultimately  to  Cicero,  and  in  the  decorations  with 
which  it  is  embellished  to  the  elder  Pliny  and  later 
writers  of  his  kind.  As  is  proper  in  what  sprang 
from  an  educational  exercise,  it  is  made  up  of  a  very 
exact  and  definite  series  of  parts.  The  writing  is 
done  on  a  plan  which  has  three  main  characteristics, 
as  follows.  First,  the  structure  of  the  sentence  is 
based  on  antithesis  and  alliteration ;  that  is  to  say, 
it  falls  into  equal  parts  similar  in  sound  but  with  a 
different  sense  ;  for  example,  Euphues  is  described 
as  a  young  gallant  "  of  more  wit  than  wealth,  yet 
of  more  wealth  than  wisdom."  All  the  characters 

in  the  book,  which  is  roughly  in  the  form   of  a 

5 


66  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

novel,  speak  in  this  way,  sometimes  in  sentences 
long    drawn    out   which   are   oppressively   mono- 
tonous  and   tedious,  and   sometimes  shortly  with 
a  certain  approach  to  epigram.     The  second  char- 
acteristic of  the  style  is   the   reference   of  every 
stated  fact  to  some  classical  authority ;  that  is  to 
say,  the  author  cannot  mention  friendship  without 
quoting  David  and  Jonathan,  nor  can  lovers  in 
his  book  accuse  each  other  of  faithlessness  without 
quoting  the  instance  of  Cressida  or  ^Eneas.     This 
appeal  to  classical  authority  and  wealth  of  classical 
allusion  is  used  to  decorate  pages  which  deal  with 
matters   of  everyday  experience.     Seneca,  for  in- 
stance, is  quoted   as   reporting   "that   too   much 
bending  breaketh   the   bow,"  a  fact  which  might 
reasonably  have  been   supposed  to  be  known  to 
the    author    himself.      This    particular    form    of 
writing  perhaps  influenced  those  who  copied  Lyly 
more  than  anything  else  in  his  book.     It  is  a  fashion 
of  the  more  artificial  kind  of  Elizabethan  writing 
in   all   schools    to   employ   a   wealth    of,  classical 
allusion.     Even  the  simple  narratives  in  Hakluyt's 
Voyages  are  not  free  from  it,  and  one  may  hardly 
hope  to  read  an  account  of  a  voyage  to  the  Indies 
without    stumbling    on    a    preliminary    reference 
to   the   opinions  of  Aristotle  and  Plato.     Lastly, 
Euphues    is     characterized    by    an    extraordinary 
wealth  of  allusion  to  natural  history,  mostly  of  a 
fabulous  kind.     "  I  have  read  that  the  bull  being 
tied  to  the  fig  tree  loseth  his  tail ;  that  the  whole 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY   AND  PROSE         67 

herd  of  deer  stand  at  gaze  if  they  smell  a  sweet 
apple ;  that  the  dolphin  after  the  sound  of  music 
is  brought  to  the  shore,"  and  so  on.  His  book  is 
full  of  these  things,  and  the  style  weakens  and 
loses  its  force  because  of  them. 

Of  course  there  is  much  more  in  his  book  than 
this  outward  decoration.  He  wrote  with  the 
avowed  purpose  of  instructing  courtiers  and  gentle- 
men how  to  live.  Euphues  is  full  of  grave  reflec- 
tions and  weighty  morals,  and  is  indeed  a  collection 
of  essays  on  education,  on  friendship,  on  religion 
and  philosophy,  and  on  the  favourite  occupation 
and  curriculum  of  Elizabethan  youth  —  foreign 
travel.  The  fashions  and  customs  of  his  country- 
men which  he  condemns  in  the  course  of  his  teaching 
are  the  same  as  those  inveighed  against  by  Stubbs 
and  other  contemporaries.  He  disliked  manners 
and  fashions  copied  from  Italy;  particularly  he 
disliked  the  extravagant  fashions  of  women.  One 
woman  only  escapes  his  censure,  and  she,  of  course, 
is  the  Queen,  whom  Euphues  and  his  companion 
in  the  book  come  to  England  to  see.  In  the  main, 
the  teaching  of  Euphues  inculcates  a  humane  and 
liberal,  if  not  very  profound  creed,  and  the  book 
shares  with  The  Faerie  Queen  the  honour  of  the 
earlier  Puritanism — the  Puritanism  that  besides  the 
New  Testament  had  the  Republic. 

But  Euphues,  though  he  was  in  his  time  the 
popular  idol,  was  not  long  in  finding  a  successful 
rival.  Seven  years  before  his  death  Sir  Philip 


68  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Sidney,  in  a  period  of  retirement  from  the  Court, 
wrote  The  Countess  of  Pembroke's  Arcadia ;  it 
was  published  ten  years  after  it  had  been  composed, 
and  when  it  came  it  ousted  its  rival  at  a  blow. 
Euphuism  was  killed ;  it  was  the  common  praise 
of  Sidney  that  he  had  assisted  at  its  death,  and 
Drayton  compliments  him  as  the  author  who 

"  Did  first  reduce 

Our  tongue  from  Lyly's  writing,  then  in  use ; 
Talking  of  stones,  stars,  plants,  of  fishes,  flies, 
Playing  with  words  and  idle  similies, 
As  the  English  apes  and  very  zanies  be 
Of  everything  that  they  do  hear  and  see.'1 

The  Arcadia  is  the  first  English  example  of  the 
prose  pastoral  romance,  as  the  Shepherd's  Calendar 
is  of  our  pastoral  verse.  Imitative  essays  in  its  style 
kept  appearing  for  two  hundred  years  after  it,  till 
Wordsworth  and  other  poets  who  knew  the  country 
drove  its  unrealities  out  of  literature.  The  aim  of 
it  and  of  the  school  to  which  it  belonged  abroad 
was  to  find  a  setting  for  a  story  which  should  leave 
the  author  perfectly  free  to  plant  in  it  any  improba- 
bility he  liked,  and  to  do  what  he  liked  with  the 
relations  of  his  characters.  In  the  shade  of  beech 
trees,  the  coils  of  elaborated  and  intricate  love- 
making  wind  and  unravel  themselves  through  an 
endless  afternoon.  In  that  art  nothing  is  too  far- 
fetched, nothing  too  sentimental,  no  sorrow  too 
unreal.  The  pastoral  romance  was  used,  too,  to 
cover  other  things  besides  a  sentimental  and 
decorative  treatment  of  love.  Authors  wrapped 


ELIZABETHAN   POETRY   AND   PROSE        69 

up  as  shepherds  their  political  friends  and  enemies, 
and  the  pastoral  eclogues  in  verse  which  Spenser 
and  others  composed  are  full  of  personal  and 
political  allusion.  Sidney's  story  carries  no  politics, 
and  he  depends  for  its  interest  solely  on  the  wealth 
of  differing  episodes  and  the  stories  and  arguments 
of  love  which  it  contains.  The  story  would  furnish 
plot  enough  for  twenty  ordinary  novels,  but  prob- 
ably those  who  read  it  when  it  was  published  were 
attracted  by  other  things  than  the  march  of  its 
incidents.  Certainly  no  one  could  read  it  for  the 
plot  now.  Its  attraction  is  mainly  one  of  style. 
It  goes,  you  feel,  one  degree  beyond  Euphues  in 
the  direction  of  freedom  and  poetry.  And  just 
because  of  this  greater  freedom,  its  characteristics 
are  much  less  easy  to  fix  than  those  of  Euphues. 
Perhaps  its  chief  quality  is  best  described  as  that 
of  exhaustiveness.  Sidney  will  take  a  word  and 
toss  it  to  and  fro  in  a  page  till  its  meaning  is  sucked 
dry  and  more  than  sucked  dry.  On  page  after 
page  the  same  trick  is  employed,  often  in  some 
new  and  charming  way,  but  with  the  inevitable 
effect  of  wearying  the  reader,  who  tries  to  do  the 
un wisest  of  all  things  with  a  book  of  this  kind — to 
read  on.  This  trick  of  bandying  words  is,  of  course, 
common  in  Shakespeare.  Other  marks  of  Sidney's 
style  belong  similarly  to  poetry  rather  than  to 
prose.  Chief  of  them  is  what  Ruskin  christened  the 
"  pathetic  fallacy  " — the  assumption  (not  common 
in  his  day)  which  connects  the  appearance  of  nature 


70  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

with  the  moods  of  the  artist  who  looks  at  it,  or 
demands  such  a  connection.  In  its  day,  as  we  have 
seen,  the  Arcadia  was  hailed  as  a  reformation  by 
men  nauseated  by  the  rhythmical  pattens  of  Lyly. 
A  modern  reader  finds  himself  confronting  it  in 
something  of  the  spirit  that  he  would  confront  the 
prose  romances,  say,  of  William  Morris,  finding  it 
charming  as  a  poet's  essay  in  prose,  but  no  more : 
not  to  be  ranked  with  the  highest. 

Yet  Sidney  when  he  liked  could  write  clear  and 
nervous  prose,  direct  and  definite  as  a  soldier's 
despatches.  His  Apology  for  Poetry  is  full  of 
noble  things  ;  he  never,  he  said,  "  heard  the  old  song 
of  Percy  and  Douglas  but  he  found  his  heart 
stirred  as  with  the  sound  of  a  trumpet."  He  is  the 
author  of  those  splendid  concentrations  of  moral 
wisdom — "  then  will  be  the  time  to  die  nobly  when 
you  cannot  live  nobly,"  and  "  there  is  nothing  more 
terrible  to  a  guilty  heart  than  the  eye  of  a  respected 
friend."  Finally,  read  his  letter  to  his  father's 
secretary,  one  of  the  most  forthright  documents  in 
English  prose : — 

"  Mr  Molyneux.  Few  words  are  best.  My  letters  to  my 
father  have  come  to  the  eyes  of  some.  Neither  can  I  condemn 
any  but  you  for  it.  If  it  be  so,  you  have  played  the  very 
knave  with  me ;  and  so  I  will  make  you  know  if  I  have  good 
proof  of  it.  But  that  for  so  much  as  is  past.  For  that  is  to 
come,  I  assure  you  before  God,  that  if  ever  I  know  you  do 
so  much  as  read  any  letter  I  write  to  my  father  without  his 
commandment,  or  my  consent,  I  will  thrust  my  dagger  into 
you.  And  trust  to  it,  for  I  speak  it  in  earnest.  In  the 
meantime,  farewell.'1 


CHAPTER  III 

THE    DRAMA 
(1) 

MEN  of  science  say  that  the  family  of  mixed 
ancestry — the  product  of  more  than  one  nationality 
— is  more  fertile  than  one  descended  from  a  single 
ancestral  stock ;  perhaps  the  analogy  is  not  too 
fanciful  as  the  starting  -  point  of  a  study  of 
Elizabethan  drama,  which  owed  its  strength  and 
vitality,  more  than  to  anything  else,  to  the  variety 
of  the  discordant  and  contradictory  elements  of 
which  it  was  made  up.  The  drama  was  the  form 
into  which  were  moulded  the  thoughts  and  desires 
of  the  best  spirits  of  the  time.  It  was  the  flower 
of  the  age.  To  appreciate  its  many-sided  signifi- 
cances and  achievements  it  is  necessary  carefully  to 
disentangle  its  roots,  in  religion,  in  the  revival  of 
the  classics,  in  popular  entertainments,  in  imports 
from  abroad,  in  the  air  of  enterprise  and  adventure 
which  belonged  to  the  time. 

As  in  Greece,  drama  in  England  was  in  its 
beginning  a  religious  thing.  Its  oldest  continuous 
tradition  was  from  the  mediaeval  Church.  Early 
in  the  Middle  Ages  the  clergy  and  their  parishioners 
began  the  habit,  at  Christmas,  Easter,  and  other 

71 


72  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

holy  days,  of  playing  some  part  of  the  story  of 
Christ's  life  suitable  to  the  festival  of  the  day. 
These  plays  were  liturgical,  and  originally,  no 
doubt,  overshadowed  by  a  choral  element.  But 
gradually  the  inherent  human  capacity  for  mimicry 
and  drama  took  the  upper  hand  ;  from  ceremonies 
they  developed  into  performances ;  they  passed 
from  the  stage  in  the  church  porch  to  the  stage  in 
the  street.  A  waggon,  the  natural  human  plat- 
form for  mimicry  or  oratory,  became  in  England, 
as  it  was  in  Greece,  the  cradle  of  the  drama.  This 
momentous  change  in  the  history  of  the  miracle 
play,  which  made  it  in  all  but  its  occasion  and  its 
subject  a  secular  thing,  took  place  about  the  end 
of  the  twelfth  century.  The  rise  of  the  town 
guilds  gave  the  plays  a  new  character ;  the  friendly 
rivalry  of  leagued  craftsmen  elaborated  their  pro- 
duction ;  and  at  length  elaborate  cycles  were 
founded  which  were  performed  at  Whitsuntide, 
beginning  at  sunrise  and  lasting  all  through  the 
day  right  on  to  dusk.  Each  town  had  its  own 
cycle,  and  of  these  the  cycles  of  York,  Wakefield, 
Chester,  and  Coventry  still  remain.  So,  too,  does 
an  eye-witness's  account  of  a  Chester  performance, 
where  the  plays  took  place  yearly  on  three  days, 
beginning  with  Whit  Monday.  "  The  manner  of 
these  plays  were,  every  company  had  his  pageant 
or  part,  a  high  scaffold  with  two  rooms,  a  higher 
and  a  lower,  upon  four  wheels.  In  the  lower  they 
apparelled  themselves  and  in  the  higher  room  they 


THE   DRAMA  73 

played,  being  all  open  on  the  top  that  all  beholders 
might  hear  and  see  them.  They  began  first  at  the 
abbey  gates,  and  when  the  first  pageant  was  played, 
it  was  wheeled  to  the  high  cross  before  the  mayor 
and  so  to  every  street.  So  every  street  had  a 
pageant  playing  upon  it  at  one  time,  till  all  the 
pageants  for  the  day  appointed  were  played." 
The  "  companies "  were  the  town  guilds,  and  the 
several  "  pageants  "  different  scenes  in  Old  or  New 
Testament  story.  As  far  as  was  possible,  each 
company  took  for  its  pageant  some  Bible  story 
fitting  to  its  trade  ;  in  York  the  goldsmiths  played 
the  three  Kings  of  the  East  bringing  precious  gifts, 
the  fishmongers  the  flood,  and  the  shipwrights  the 
building  of  Noah's  ark.  The  tone  of  these  plays 
was  not  reverent ;  reverence  after  all  may  imply 
near  at  hand  its  opposite  in  unbelief.  But  they 
were  realistic  and  they  contained  within  them  the 
seeds  of  later  drama  in  the  aptitude  with  which 
they  grafted  into  the  sacred  story  pastoral  and  city 
manners  taken  straight  from  life.  The  shepherds 
who  watched  by  night  at  Bethlehem  were  real 
English  shepherds  furnished  with  boisterous  and 
realistic  comic  relief.  Noah  was  a  real  shipwright. 

"  It  shall  be  clinched  each  ilk  and  deal. 
With  nails  that  are  both  noble  and  new 
Thus  shall  I  fix  it  to  the  keel, 
Take  here  a  rivet  and  there  a  screw, 
With  there  bow  there  now,  work  I  well, 
This  work,  I  warrant,  both  good  and  true." 

Cain   and   Abel   were   English   farmers  just  as 


74  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

truly  as  Bottom  and  his  fellows  were  English 
craftsmen.  But  then  Julius  Caesar  has  a  doublet, 
and  in  Dutch  pictures  the  apostles  wear  broad- 
brimmed  hats.  Squeamishness  about  historical 
accuracy  is  of  a  later  date,  and  when  it  came  we 
gained  in  correctness  less  than  we  lost  in  art. 

The  miracle  plays,  then,  are  the  oldest  antecedent 
of  Elizabethan  drama,  but  it  must  not  be  sup- 
posed they  were  over  and  done  with  before  the 
great  age  began.  The  description  of  the  Chester 
performances,  part  of  which  has  been  quoted,  was 
written  in  1594.  Shakespeare  must,  one  would 
think,  have  seen  the  Coventry  cycle ;  at  any  rate 
he  was  familiar,  as  everyone  of  the  time  must 
have  been,  with  the  performances  ;  "  Out-heroding 
Herod  "  bears  witness  to  that.  One  must  conceive 
the  development  of  the  Elizabethan  age  as  some- 
thing so  rapid  in  its  accessibility  to  new  impressions 
and  new  manners  and  learning  and  modes  of 
thought,  that  for  years  the  old  and  new  subsisted 
side  by  side.  Think  of  modern  Japan,  a  welter  of 
old  faiths  and  crafts  and  ideals  and  inrushing 
Western  civilization  all  mixed  up  and  side  by  side 
in  the  strangest  contrasts,  and  you  will  understand 
what  it  was.  The  miracle  plays  stayed  on  beside 
Marlowe  and  Shakespeare  till  Puritanism  frowned 
upon  them.  But  when  the  end  came  it  came 
quickly.  The  last  recorded  performance  took 
place  in  London  when  King  James  entertained 
Gondomar,  the  Spanish  ambassador.  And  perhaps 


THE   DRAMA  75 

we  should  regard  that  as  a  "  command  "  perform- 
ance, reviving,  as  command  performances  commonly 
do,  something  dead  for  a  generation — in  this  case, 
perhaps  out  of  compliment  to  the  faith  and  inclina- 
tion of  a  distinguished  guest. 

Next  in  order  of  development  after  the  miracle 
or  mystery  plays,  though  contemporary  in  their 
popularity,  came  what  were  called  "  moralities  "  or 
"  moral  interludes  "-  —pieces  designed  to  enforce  a 
religious  or  ethical  lesson  and  perhaps  to  get  back 
into  drama  something  of  the  edification  which 
realism  had  ousted  from  the  miracles.  They  dealt 
in  allegorical  and  figurative  personages,  expounded 
wise  saws  and  moral  lessons,  and  squared  rather 
with  the  careful  self-concern  of  the  newly  estab- 
lished Protestantism  than  with  the  frank  and  joyous 
zest  in  life  which  was  more  characteristic  of  the 
time.  Everyman,  the  oftenest  revived  and  best 
known  of  them,  if  not  the  best,  is  very  typical  of 
the  class.  They  had  their  influences,  less  profound 
than  that  of  the  miracles,  on  the  real  drama.  It 
is  said  the  "  Vice  "  —  unregeneracy  commonly  de- 
generated into  comic  relief— is  the  ancestor  of  the 
fool  in  Shakespeare,  but  more  likely  both  are 
successive  creations  of  a  dynasty  of  actors  who 
practised  the  unchanging  and  immemorial  art  of 
the  clown.  The  general  structure  of  Everyman 
and  some  of  its  fellows,  heightened  and  made  more 
dramatic,  gave  us  Marlowe's  Faustus.  There  per- 
haps the  influence  ends. 


76  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

The  rise  of  a  professional  class  of  actors  brought 
one  step  nearer  the  full  growth  of  drama.  Com- 
panies of  strolling  players  formed  themselves  and 
passed  from  town  to  town,  seeking,  like  the  in- 
dustrious amateurs  of  the  guilds,  civic  patronage, 
and  performing  in  town-halls,  market-place  booths, 
or  inn-yards,  whichever  served  them  best.  The 
structure  of  the  Elizabethan  inn-yard  (you  may  see 
some  survivals  still)  was  very  favourable  for  their 
purpose.  The  galleries  round  it  made  seats  like  our 
boxes  and  circle  for  the  more  privileged  spectators  ; 
in  the  centre  on  the  floor  of  the  yard  stood  the 
crowd,  or  sat,  if  they  had  stools  with  them.  The 
stage  was  a  platform  set  on  this  floor  space  with  its 
back  against  one  side  of  the  yard,  where  perhaps 
one  of  the  inn-rooms  served  as  a  dressing-room. 
So  suitable  was  this  "  fit -up,"  as  actors  call  it,  that 
when  theatres  came  to  be  built  in  London  they 
were  built  on  the  inn-yard  pattern.  All  the  play- 
houses of  the  Bankside,  from  the  "  Curtain  "  to  the 
"  Globe,"  were  square  or  circular  places  with 
galleries  rising  above  one  another  three  parts 
round,  a  floor  space  of  beaten  earth  open  to  the 
sky  in  the  middle,  and  jutting  out  on  to  it  a 
platform  stage  with  a  tiring  room  capped  by  a 
gallery  behind  it. 

The  entertainment  given  by  these  companies  of 
players  (who  usually  got  the  patronage  and  took 
the  title  of  some  lord)  was  various.  They  played 
moralities  and  interludes,  they  played  formless 


THE   DRAMA  77 

chronicle  history  plays  like  the  Troublesome  Reign 
oj  King  John,  on  which  Shakespeare  worked  for 
his  King  John  ;  but  above  and  before  all  they  were 
each  a  company  of  specialists,  every  one  of  whom 
had  his  own  talent  and  performance  for  which  he 
was  admired.  The  Elizabethan  stage  was  the 
ancestor  of  our  music-hall,  and  to  the  modern 
music-hall  rather  than  to  the  theatre  it  bears  its 
affinity.  If  you  wish  to  realize  the  aspect  of  the 
Globe  or  the  Blackfriars,  it  is  to  a  lower  class 
music-hall  you  must  go.  The  quality  of  the 
audience  is  a  point  of  agreement.  The  Globe  was 
frequented  by  young  "bloods"  and  by  the  more 
disreputable  portions  of  the  community,  racing 
men  (or  their  equivalents  of  that  day),  "coney 
catchers  "  and  the  like ;  commonly  the  only  women 
present  were  women  of  the  town.  The  similarity 
extends  from  the  auditorium  to  the  stage.  The 
Elizabethan  playgoer  delighted  in  virtuosity ;  in 
exhibitions  of  strength  or  skill  from  his  actors  ;  the 
broadsword  combat  in  Macbeth,  and  the  wrestling 
in  As  You  Like  It,  were  real  trials  of  skill.  The 
bear  in  the  Winter  s  Tale  was  no  doubt  a  real  bear 
got  from  a  bear-pit,  near  by  in  the  Bankside.  The 
comic  actors  especially  were  the  very  grandfathers 
of  our  music-hall  stars ;  Tarleton  and  Kemp  and 
Cowley,  the  chief  of  them,  were  as  much  popular 
favourites  and  esteemed  as  separate  from  the  plays 
they  played  in  as  any  of  the  artists  who  play  in 
music-hall  or  pantomime  in  our  own  day.  Their 


78  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

songs  and  tunes  were  printed  and  sold  in  hundreds 
as  broadsheets,  just  as  pirated  music-hall  songs  are 
sold  to-day.  This  is  to  be  noted,  because  it  explains 
a  great  deal  in  the  subsequent  evolution  of  the 
drama.  It  explains  the  delight  of  having  every- 
^Athing  represented  actually  on  the  stage,  all  murders, 
battles,  duels.  It  explains  the  magnificent  largesse 
given  by  Shakespeare  to  the  professional  fool.  V 
Work  had  to  be  found  for  him,  and  Shakespeare, 
whose  difficulties  were  stepping-stones  to  his 
triumphs,  gave  him  Touchstone  and  Feste,  the 
Porter  in  Macbeth  and  the  Fool  in  Lear.  Others 
put  lines  and  songs  in  for  him  without  caring 
whether  they  were  incongruous  with  the  action.  A 
play  like  John  Hey  wood's  Rape  of  Lucrece,  in 
which  low  comedy  dialogue  and  catches  are  inter- 
mingled with  the  tragic  action,  and  further  songs 
too  completely  at  variance  with  it  printed  by  the 
author,  when  he  published  his  play,  in  an  appendix, 
is  astonishing  to  the  modern  reader  who  takes 
his  notion  of  Elizabethan  Roman  tragedy  from 
Julius  Ccesar  or  Sejanus.  Others  met  the  problem 
in  an  attitude  of  frank  despair.  Not  all  great 
tragic  writers  can  easily  or  gracefully  wield  the 
pen  of  comedy,  and  Marlowe  in  Dr  Faustus  took 
the  course  of  leaving  the  low  comedy  which  the 
audience  loved  and  a  high-salaried  actor  demanded, 
to  an  inferior  collaborator. 

Alongside  this  drama   of  street  platforms   and 
inn-yards  and  public  theatres,  there  grew  another 


THE   DRAMA  79 

•  which,  blending  with  it,  produced  the  Elizabethan 

drama  which  we  know.     The  public  theatres  were 

not  the  only  places  at  which  plays  were  produced. 

At  the  University,  at  the  Inns  of  Court   (which 

j  then  more  than  now  were  besides  centres  of  study 

I  rather  exclusive  and  expensive  clubs),  and  at  the 

j  Court  they  were  an  important  part  of  almost  every 

j  festival.     At  these  places  were  produced  academic 

compositions,   either  allegorical  like  the  masques, 

copies   of  which   we   find  in  Shakespeare  and  by 

Ben  Jonson,  or  comedies  modelled  on  Plautus  or 

Terence,  or   tragedies   modelled  on  Seneca.     The 

last  were  incomparably  the  most  important.     The 

Elizabethan  age,  which  always  thought  of  literature 

as   a  guide   or    handmaid   to   life,   was   naturally 

attracted    to   a   poet  who   dealt  in   maxims    and 

"  sentences " ;    his   rhetoric   appealed   to   men   for 

whom  words  and  great  passages  of  verse  were  an 

intoxication  that  only  a  few  to-day  can  understand 

or  sympathize  with  ;  his  bloodthirstiness  and  gloom 

to  an  age  so  full-blooded   as  not   to  shrink  from 

horrors.     Tragedies  early  began  to  be  written  on 

the   strictly   Senecan   model,   and    generally,   like 

Seneca's,  with  some  ulterior  intention.     Sackville's 

Gorboduc,  the  first  tragedy  in  English,  produced 

at  a  great  festival  at  the  Inner  Temple,  aimed  at 

inducing  Elizabeth  to  marry  and  save  the  miseries 

of  a  disputed  succession.     To  be  put  to  such  a  use 

argues  the  importance  and  dignity  of  this  classical 

tragedy   of  the   learned  societies  and  the  Court. 


80  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

None  of  the  pieces  composed  in  this  style  were 
written  for  the  popular  theatre,  and  indeed  they 
could  not  have  been  a  success  on  it.  The  Eliza- 
bethan audience,  as  we  have  seen,  loved  action, 
and  in  these  Senecan  tragedies  the  action  took  place 
"  off."  But  they  had  a  strong  and  abiding  influence 
on  the  popular  stage ;  they  gave  it  its  ghosts,  its 
supernatural  warnings,  its  conception  of  nemesis 
and  revenge,  they  gave  it  its  love  of  introspection 
and  the  long  passages  in  which  introspection,  de- 
scription or  reflection,  either  in  soliloquy  or  dialogue, 
holds  up  the  action ;  contradictorily  enough  they 
gave  it  something  at  least  of  its  melodrama. 
Perhaps  they  helped  to  enforce  the  lesson  of  the 
miracle  plays  that  a  dramatist's  proper  business  was 
elaboration  rather  than  invention.  None  of  the 
Elizabethan  dramatists  except  Ben  Jonson  habitu- 
ally constructed  their  own  plots.  Their  method 
was  to  take  something  ready  at  their  hands  and 
overlay  it  with  realism  or  poetry  or  romance.  The 
stories  of  their  plays,  like  that  of  Hamlet's  Mouse- 
trap, were  "  extant  and  writ  in  choice  Italian,"  and 
very  often  their  methods  of  preparation  were  very 
like  his. 

It  is  time  now  to  turn  to  the  dramatists  them- 
selves. 

(2) 

Of  Marlowe,  Kyd,  Greene,  and  Peele,  the 
"  University  Wits  "  who  fused  the  academic  and 
the  popular  drama,  and,  by  giving  the  latter  a  sense 


THE  DRAMA  81 

of  literature  and  learning  to  mould  it  to  finer  issues, 
gave  us  Shakespeare,  only  Marlowe  is  of  consider- 
able literary  importance.  Greene  and  Peele,  the 
former  by  his  comedies,  the  latter  by  his  historical 
plays,  and  Kyd  by  his  tragedies,  have  their  places 
in  the  text-books,  but  they  belong  to  a  secondary 
order  of  dramatic  talent.  Greene's  plays,  indeed, 
of  which  only  five  remain  to  us,  are  by  no  means 
his  best  work.  He  is  most  charming  in  his  novels 
and  in  the  songs  and  love  lyrics  interspersed  in 
them.  One  of  these — Pandosto,  the  Triumph  of 
Time — seems  to  have  given  Shakespeare  the  plot  of 
the  Winter's  Tale.  Of  his  plays  all  but  one  are 
comedies,  but  they  give  no  hint  of  the  profligacy 
of  life  which  he  has  himself  so  fully  unfolded  to  us 
in  his  autobiographical  pamphlets,  and  which  made 
him  a  byword  even  in  the  full-blooded  age  in  which 
he  lived.  Their  chief  merit,  perhaps,  lies  in  the 
beauty  of  language  and  imagery  which  they  dis- 
close from  time  to  time  in  their  uneven  pages — a 
beauty  drawn  directly  from  a  study  of  the  classical 
poets,  chiefly  Ovid,  whom  Greene's  university 
training  enabled  him,  no  doubt,  to  read  in  the 
original.  Of  Peele's  six  plays,  the  two  chronicle 
histories  were  the  most  popular,  and  they  had  the 
deepest  influence  on  the  drama  of  the  succeeding 
generation.  As  was  natural  in  a  writer  working 
for  the  new  popular  theatre  and  depending  on 
popular  success,  hatred  of  Spain  and  "  no  Popery  " 
are  the  mainsprings  of  their  plots.  Elinor,  the 


82  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

wife  of  Edward  I.,  is  a  Spanish  princess  and  a 
monster  of  lust  and  pride,  and  Stukely,  the  hero 
of  the  Battle  of  Alcazar,  is  a  renegade  Englishman 
commissioned  by  the  Pope  to  raise  a  rebellion  in 
Ireland.  With  Kyd  we  come  to  more  serious 
matter.  We  have  seen  how  the  drama  modelled 
on  Seneca  had  attained  in  the  Inns  of  Court  and  at 
the  Universities  an  academic  and  literary  eminence  ; 
in  the  popular  theatres,  on  the  other  hand,  though 
there  was,  by  the  time  of  Greene  and  Peele,  a 
vigorous  comic  tradition,  there  was  as  yet  no  tragic 
school.  By  transferring  the  Senecan  drama  to  the  ^ 
London  stage,  by  seizing  hold  of  its  essential  faculty, 
which  was  the  gift  of  arousing  and  sustaining  horror/ 
and  excitement,  and  by  altering  its  method  so  tha;fc 
the  action,  instead  of  being  reported  by  spectators 
and  messengers,  was  directly  represented,  and  the 
plot,  instead  of  being  concerned  with  classic  myth 
or  tradition,  took  love  or  political  intrigue  for  its  ) 
theme,  Kyd  gave  English  tragedy  the  impulse  ) 
which  has  given  us  not  only  Titus  Andronicus,  but 
Hamlet,  the  Duchess  of  Malfi,  The  Ccnci,  and  for 
the  matter  of  that  every  popular  melodrama  since. 
The  Spanish  Tragedy,  which  was  the  play  by  which 
these  things  were  accomplished,  has  little  character- 
interest;  individuality  does  not  assert  itself;  it  is, 
as  it  were,  Hamlet  without  the  Prince  of  Denmark. 
But  if  it  has  none  of  the  psychological  study 
which  makes  Shakespeare's  tragedies  supreme,  and 
in  a  less  complete  and  subtle  way  gives  interest  to 


THE   DRAMA  83 

those  of  Middleton  and  Webster,  it  has  the  merit 
of  continuous  sensational  interest — the  interest  of 
incident  and  action — which  is  the  mark  of  melo- 
drama as  a  form  of  stage-craft.  It  has,  too,  a 
narrower  technical  interest.  It  established  for  the 
first  time  the  device  of  the  subordinate  plot  which ^ 
Shakespeare  worked  with  such  effect  in  Hamlet  and 
King  Lear,  and  it  is  the  origin  of  some  of  the  most 
permanent  pieces  of  stage  "  business "  of  Eliza- 
bethan tragedy — the  use  of  dumb  show  (as  in  the 
fourth  act  of  Macbeth  at  his  last  encounter  with  the 
witches),  the  device  of  a  play  within  a  play  (as  in 
Hamlet),  the  employment  of  madness  and  feigning 
madness,  as  in  Hamlet  and  King  Lear  and  many 
others.  It  is  no  wonder  that  the  play  passed  into 
the  minds  not  only  of  Kyd's  fellow- authors,  but  of 
his  audiences,  and  that  a  quotation  from  it  or  a 
line  in  parody  was  the  surest  and  most  successful 
appeal  that  the  stage  could  make  for  years  after- 
wards to  the  stalls. 

But  Kyd,  though  his  historical  position  makes 
him  important,  must  take,  on  the  general  ground 
of  literary  merit,  an  inferior  place.  Marlowe  ranks 
amongst  the  greatest.  It  is  not  merely  that  his- 
torically he  is  the  head  and  fount  of  the  whole 
movement,  that  he  changed  blank  verse,  which  had 
been  a  lumbering  instrument  before  him,  into  some- 
thing rich  and  ringing  and  rapid  and  made  it  the 
vehicle  for  the  greatest  English  poetry  after  him. 
Historical  relations  apart,  he  is  great  in  himself. 


84  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

More  than  any  other  English  writer  of  any  age, 
except  Byron,  he  symbolizes  the  youth  of  his  time : 
its  hot-bloodedness,  its  lust  after  knowledge   and 
power  and  life,  inspire  all  his  pages.     The  teaching 
of  Machiavelli,  misunderstood  for  their  own  purposes 
by   would-be    imitators,   furnished    the    reign    of 
Elizabeth  with  the  only  political  ideals  it  possessed. 
The   simple   brutalism   of  the  creed,  with  means 
justified  by  ends  and  the  unbridled  self-regarding 
pursuit   of  power,  attracted   men   for  whom   the 
Spanish  monarchy  and  the  struggle  to  overthrow 
it  were  the   main  factors   in   politics.      Marlowe 
took  it  and  turned  it  to  his  own  uses.     There  is  in 
his  writings  a  lust  of  power,  "  a  hunger  and  thirst 
after  unrighteousness,"  a  glow  of  the  imagination  un- 
hallowed by  anything  but  its  own  energy,  which  is 
in  the  spirit  of  the  time.     In  Tamburlaine  it  is  the 
power  of  conquest,  stirred  by  and  reflecting  the  great 
deeds  of  his  day.     In  Dr  Faustus  it  is  the  pride 
of  will  and  eagerness  of  curiosity.     Both  have  their 
basis  in  the  voyagers.     "Without   the  voyagers," 
says  Professor   Walter   Raleigh,  "  Marlowe  is  in- 
conceivable."    His  imagination  in  every  one  of  his 
plays  is  preoccupied  with  the  lust  of  adventure  and 
the  wealth  and  power  adventure  brings.     Tambur- 
laine, Eastern  conqueror  though  he  is,  is  at  heart 
an   Englishman   of  the   school   of    Hawkins   and 
Drake.    Indeed,  the  comparison  must  have  occurred 
to  his  own  age,  for  an  historian  of  the  day,  the 
antiquary  Stow,  declares  Drake  to  have  been  "  as 


THE   DRAMA  85 

famous  in  Europe  and  America  as  Tamburlaine 
was  in  Asia  and  Africa."  The  high-sounding 
names  and  quests  which  seem  to  us  to  give  the 
play  an  air  of  unreality  and  romance  were  to  the 
Elizabethans  real  and  actual ;  things  as  strange  and 
foreign  were  to  be  heard  any  day  amongst  the 
motley  crowd  in  the  Bankside  outside  the  theatre 
door.  Tamburlaine's  last  speech  when  he  calls 
for  a  map  and  points  the  way  to  unrealized  con- 
quests is  the  very  epitome  of  the  age  of  discovery. 

"  Lo  here,  my  sons,  are  all  the  golden  mines, 
Inestimable  wares  and  precious  stones, 
More  worth  than  Asia  and  all  the  world  beside ; 
And  from  the  Antarctic  Pole  eastward  behold 
As  much  more  land,  which  never  was  descried, 
Wherein  are  rocks  of  pearl  that  shine  as  bright 
As  all  the  lamps  that  beautify  the  sky." 

It  is  the  same  in  his  other  plays.  Dr  Faustus 
assigns  to  his  serviceable  spirits  tasks  that  might 
have  been  studied  from  the  books  of  Hakluyt. 

"  111  have  them  fly  to  India  for  gold, 
Ransack  the  ocean  for  orient  pearl, 
And  search  all  corners  of  the  new  round  world 
For  pleasant  fruits  and  princely  delicates." 

Faustus  is  devoured  by  a  tormenting  desire  to 
enlarge  his  knowledge  to  the  utmost  bounds  of 
nature  and  art  and  to  extend  his  power  with  his 
knowledge.  His  is  the  spirit  of  Renaissance 
^scholarship  heightened  to  a  passionate  excess. 
The  play  gleams  with  the  pride  of  learning  and 
a  knowledge  which  learning  brings,  and  with  the 


86  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

nemesis  that  comes  after  it.  "  Oh  !  gentlemen  ! 
hear  me  with  patience  and  tremble  not  at  my 
speeches.  Though  my  heart  pant  and  quiver  to 
remember  that  I  have  been  a  student  here  these 
thirty  years ;  oh !  I  would  I  had  never  seen 
Wittemberg,  never  read  book ! "  And  after  the 
agonizing  struggle  in  which  Faustus's  soul  is  torn 
from  him  to  hell,  learning  comes  in  at  the  quiet 

close. 

"  Yet,  for  he  was  a  scholar  once  admired, 
For  wondrous  knowledge  in  our  German  Schools, 

We'll  give  his  mangled  limbs  due  burial ; 
And  all  the  students,  clothed  in  mourning  black 

Shall  wait  upon  his  heavy  funeral." 

Some  one  character  is  a  centre  of  overmastering 
pride  and  ambition  in  every  play.  In  the  Jew  of 
Malta  it  is  the  hero  Barabbas.  In  Edward  II.  it 
is  Piers  Gaveston.  In  Edward  II. ,  indeed,  two 
elements  are  mixed — the  element  of  Machiavelli 
and  Tamburlaine  in  Gaveston,  and  the  purely  tragic 
element,  which  evolves  from  within  itself  the  style 
in  which  it  shall  be  treated,  in  the  King.  "  The 
reluctant  pangs  of  abdicating  Royalty,"  wrote 
Charles  Lamb  in  a  famous  passage,  "  furnished 
hints  which  Shakespeare  scarcely  improved  in  his 
Richard  II.  ;  and  the  death-scene  of  Marlowe's 
King  moves  pity  and  terror  beyond  any  scene, 
ancient  or  modern,  with  which  I  am  acquainted." 
Perhaps  the  play  gives  the  hint  of  what  Marlowe 
might  have  become  had  not  the  dagger  of  a  groom 
in  a  tavern  cut  short  at  thirty  his  burning  career. 


THE   DRAMA  87 

Even  in  that  time  of  romance  and  daring  specula- 
tion he  went  further  than  his  fellows.  He  was 
said  to  have  been  tainted  with  atheism,  to  have 
denied  God  and  the  Trinity ;  had  he  lived  he  might 
have  had  trouble  with  the  Star  Chamber.  The 
free-voyaging  intellect  of  the  age  found  this  one 
way  of  outlet ;  but  if  literary  evidences  are  to  be 
trusted,  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  century  atheism 
was  a  very  crude  business.  The  Atheist's  Tragedy 
of  Tourneur  (a  dramatist  who  need  not  otherwise 
detain  us)  gives  some  measure  of  its  intelligence 
and  depth.  Says  the  villain  to  the  heroine, 

"  No  ?     Then  invoke 
Your  great  supposed  Protector.     I  will  do'V 

to  which  she : 

"  Supposed  Protector  !     Are  you  an  atheist  ? — then 
I  know  my  fears  and  prayers  are  spent  in  vain." 

Marlowe's  very  faults  and  extravagances,  and 
they  are  many,  are  only  the  obverse  of  his  great- 
ness. Magnitude  and  splendour  of  language,  when 
the  thought  is  too  shrunken  to  fill  it  out,  becomes 
mere  inflation.  He  was  a  butt  of  the  parodists  of 
the  day.  And  Shakespeare,  though  he  honoured 
him  "on  this  side  idolatry,"  did  his  share  of  ridicule. 
Ancient  Pistol  is  fed  and  stuffed  with  relics  and 
rags  of  Marlowesque  affectation. 

"  Holla !  ye  pampered  jades  of  Asia, 
Can  ye  not  draw  but  twenty  miles  a  day  ?  " 

is  a  quotation  taken  straight  from  Tamburfaine. 


88  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

(3)* 

Shakespeare  refuses  to  be  crushed  within  the 
limits  of  a  general  essay,  and  a  detailed  study  of 
him  cannot  be  attempted  here. 

He  was  two  months  younger  than  Marlowe, 
and  he  survived  him  by  more  than  twenty  years. 
In  the  course  of  his  life  he  raised  the  drama  to  a 
point  of  perfection  unimagined  by  those  who  had 
gone  before  him,  and  made  himself,  not  only  the 
greatest  poet  and  dramatist  of  the  age,  but  the 
acknowledged  master  of  written  literature  in  any 
time  or  tongue.  Unlike  most  of  his  contemporaries 
and  successors,  who  were  nearly  all  Londoners, 
and  most  of  them  men  of  university  education, 
Shakespeare  was  a  countryman  born  and  had  no 
more  than  a  countryman's  schooling.  It  is  the 
fashion  of  those  who  would  like  to  prove  that  his 
works  were  written  by  someone  else  to  assert  that 
we  know  little  of  his  life,  and  that  the  little  which 
we  do  know  makes  it  incredible  that  the  son 
of  a  butcher  and  wool  merchant  in  Stratford- 
on-Avon  should  have  written  these  plays.  It  is, 
on  the  contrary,  the  fact  that  we  know  more  about 
his  career  than  we  do  about  that  of  any  of  his 
contemporary  playwrights,  that  scarcely  a  year 
passes  but  that  we  add  something  to  our  know- 
ledge, and  that  what  from  the  evidence  of  con- 
temporary authors  and  others  of  the  century 
following,  from  records  and  documents,  legal  and 


THE   DRAMA  89 

otherwise,  which  have  been  preserved,  and  from  the 
internal  evidence  which  a  laborious  detective  skill 
has  gathered  from  the  plays  themselves,  we  have 
now  a  reasonably  certain  record  of  the  course  of  his 
life,  and  can  place  in  their  proper  order  the  things 
that  he  wrote.  Of  course,  many  points  are  still 
dark  to  us.  We  know  of  his  parentage,  his 
marriage,  and  his  education,  and  the  financial 
troubles  of  his  father,  which  supply  an  adequate 
reason  for  his  going  to  London  to  seek  his  fortune, 
but  we  do  not  know  exactly  how  or  when  he  went, 
and  what  he  did  when  he  first  went  there.  What 
is  certain  is  that  in  1586  he  was  already  a  member 
of  the  company  of  players  under  the  patronage  of 
the  Earl  of  Leicester,  and  that  he  continued  with 
it  until  1609,  when  he  left  for  Stratford,  by  which 
time  it  was  under  the  patronage  of  the  king  him- 
self. As  an  actor  he  does  not  seem  to  have  been 
particularly  remarkable,  and  the  few  parts  that 
tradition  or  record  has  assigned  to  him  are  none 
of  them  leading  ones. 

It  is  difficult  to  fix  exactly  the  time  at  which  his 
dramatic  work  began.  Probably  it  was  at  or  about 
the  year  1590.  At  any  rate,  for  twenty  years  after 
that  date  he  produced  an  average  of  two  plays  a 
year,  most  of  them  entirely  written  by  himself, 
but  some  of  the  earlier  and  later  probably  colla- 
borations with  other  men  or  adaptations  from  their 
work.  Only  sixteen  of  them  were  published  in  his 
lifetime,  and  then  clearly  not  at  the  dates  at  which 


90  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

they  were  written  or  produced.  The  others  were 
not  put  in  print  until  seven  years  after  his  death,  in 
the  folio  which  is  the  main  canon  of  his  works,  and 
they  are  there  arranged,  not  according  to  chrono- 
logical order,  but  according  to  subject-matter. 
Laborious  research  has,  however,  made  the  order 
of  them  fairly  certain,  and  the  criterion  by  which  the 

x  .order  has  been  decided  is  mainly  that  of  the  quality 
of  the  blank  verse.  We  have  seen  earlier  how  this 
metre  after  its  introduction  developed  in  variety 
and  freedom,  and  grew  from  a  simple  and  rather 
monotonous  series  of  uniformly  accented  lines  into 
the  most  effective  and  various  medium  of  poetic 
expression  that  our  language  possesses.  Now  the 
blank  verse  of  Shakespeare,  when  the  plays  are  set 
in  their  proper  order,  is,  as  it  were,  an  epitome  of 
the  development  of  the  metre  from  Surrey,  who 
used  it  first,  through  Marlowe  to  Milton,  who  a 
quarter  of  a  century  after  Shakespeare's  death  took 
it  up  again  for  high  poetic  uses.  If  we  find,  then, 
in  the  folio  edition  some  plays  in  which  blank  verse 
is  used  in  the  way  of  Surrey  and  Marlowe,  that  is 
to  say  regularly  following  formal  rules  of  accent 

'and  pause,  and  clearly  marking  off  one  line  from 
another,  and  if  we  find  in  others  that  a  varied 
pause  and  stress  continually  run  the  sense  on  from 

-  one  line  to  another,  and  that  even  extra  syllables 
are  added  which  the  strictest  rules  of  prosody 
would  not  seem  to  admit,  we  are  justified  in  assum- 
ing that  the  more  formal  and  imitative  style  came 


THE   DRAMA  91 

first,  and  that  the  poet,  when  he  increased  his  com- 
mand over  his  medium,  began  to  use  it  in  his  own 
way,  to  find  in  it  the  possibility  of  fresh  dramatic 
expressiveness,  and  gradually  to  absolve  himself 
from  the  formality  of  rule.  Other  signs  of  the 
same  kind  enforce  the  theory  of  chronology  which 
was  originally  based  on  blank  verse.  Rhyme,  which 
is  frequent  in  the  plays  which  are  written  with 
regularly  built  lines,  is  absent  in  the  plays  where 
the  verse  is  used  more  freely,  and  we  are  justified 
in  assuming  that  its  disappearance  is  due  to  advanc- 
ing mastery  of  an  art.  Finally,  when  we  find  some 
/  plays  that  use  continually  fantastic  images  or  puns 
and  plays  upon  words,  and  others  which  are  entirely 
free  from  these  artifices,  we  feel  justified  in  assum- 
ing that  freedom  means  maturity  and  that  the 
most  fantastic  are  also  the  earliest  works.  All  this 
internal  evidence  is,  of  course,  eked  out  by  ex- 
ternal help — contemporary  references  to  plays, 
quotations  from  them,  records  of  performances, 
and  so  forth, — and  the  result  is  the  order  of  plays, 
lighter  comedies,  and  chronicle  histories  first,  graver 
comedies  and  an  ascending  scale  of  tragedies  later, 
and  then  grave  and  .peaceful  romances  at  the  close, 
which  is  familiar  now  to  every  reader  and  hardly 
disputed  by  any. 

Shakespeare,  as  all  this  implies,  is  superior  to  his 
contemporaries  in  his  command  over  the  medium 
of  verse  ;  but  that  alone  would  not  have  sufficed  to 
give  him  the  pre-eminence  which  they  and  his 


92  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

successors  have  united  in  according  him.  The 
drama  always  comes  very  near  the  novel,  and  the 
Elizabethan  drama  is  closer  than  any  to  the  methods 
which  novelists  use.  It  is  in  fact  a  narrative  art, 
and  it  is  in  this  power  of  telling  the  story  thatx 
Shakespeare  excels  the  other  playwrights  of  his 
time.  A  study  of  the  plots  of  either  the  comedies 
or  the  tragedies  will  convince  the  reader  that  the 
orderly  faculty  of  marshalling  events  has  never 
been  so  completely  shown  in  the  work  of  any  other 
writer.  Let  such  a  play  be  taken  as  The  Merchant 
of  Venice.  It  will  be  noted  how  easily  the  action 
moves  from  Venice  itself  to  Belmont,  from  the 
fortunes  of  Antonio  to  those  of  Bassanio,  and  from 
both  to  those  of  Portia  on  the  one  hand  and  Shy- 
lock  on  the  other.  A  dramatist  of  a  stricter  school 
could  not  have  got  so  many  figures  onto  his  can- 
vas ;  no  novelist  whose  works  we  know  could  have 
sketched  his  plot  at  once  so  fully  and  sparingly, 
introduced  so  many  figures  and  kept  each  one  so 
justly  and  perfectly  in  its  place.  If  such  a  play  be 
compared  (and  the  comparison  would  be  even  more 
striking  in  the  case  of  the  tragedies)  with  the  work 
of  Shakespeare's  contemporaries  and  successors,  it 
will  be  seen  that  apart  from  the  superiority  of  his 
genius  in  the  two  domains  of  poetry  and  the  de- 
lineation of  character,  he  was  incomparably  the  best 
story-teller  of  his  time. 

It  is  not,  however,  by  his  incomparable  gift  for 
story-telling  that  the  world  has  judged  him  to  be 


THE   DRAMA  98 

the  best  dramatist  of  his  own  or  any  age.  Shake- 
speare is  pre-eminent  not  because  he  was  a  teller 
of  tales — for  indeed  most  of  his  stories  had  been 
told  beforehand,  though  less  well  than  by  him, — 
„  but  because  of  the  incomparable  insight  which  he 
possessed  into  character,  into  the  motives  and  the 
springs  of  men's  actions,  and  into  the  inevitable 
processes  by  which  events  follow  from  the  strength 
or  the  weaknesses  of  the  actors  who  take  part  in 
them.  Asa  successful  business  playwright,  he  had 
to  appeal  to  the  audiences  on  whom  his  livelihood 
depended  with  stories  full  of  incident  and  cast  in 
a  mould  of  melodrama,  but  he  contrived  to  satisfy 
his  artistic  conscience  at  the  same  time  as  he 
satisfied  the  longings  of  his  audience.  Not  only 
did  he  do  the  melodrama  better  than  Kyd  or 
Marston,  but  he  added  to  it  an  interest  which  was 
absent  in  their  work  and  that  of  other  men. 
Hamlet  is  a  melodrama  of  the  same  school  as  the 
Spanish  Tragedy  and  the  works  of  Marston  and 
Webster,  but  it  has  added  to  the  interest  of 
incident  which  it  shares  with  these  the  rarer  and 
more  subtle  interest  of  character.  There  is  a 
popular  saying  which  compares  anything  which 
has  been  robbed  utterly  of  its  significance  to  the 
play  of  Hamlet  without  the  Prince  of  Denmark, 
and  the  comparison  gives  the  measure  of  Shake- 
speare's peculiar  genius.  Hamlet  without  the 
Prince  of  Denmark  would  still  be  the  best  melo- 
drama of  its  time,  but  it  would  lack  everything 


94  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

that  has  made  it  the  greatest  tragedy  since  the 
fall  of  Greece,  the  greatest  which  the  modern 
world  will  ever  know.  The  supreme  and  pre- 
eminent interest  in  Hamlet  is  not  the  plot  but  the 
character  of  the  hero,  the  indecision  which  is  born 
in  him  as  the  result  of  a  terrible  train  of  events 
and  a  great  responsibility,  his  struggle  with  it  and 
his  final  triumph  over  it,  with  the  tragedy  which 
follows  on  the  immersion  of  a  man  too  fine  and 
sensitive  to  bear  the  rude  shock  of  the  world  into 
the  midst  of  events  which  were  too  much  for  him. 
It  is  the  same  in  Othello,  in  King  Lear,  and  in 
Macbeth,  in  all  of  which  the  story  as  a  story  is 
better  told  than  it  has  been  by  anyone  else,  but 
in  all  of  which  the  circumstance  by  which  they 
are  remembered  is  the  interest  not  of  plot  but  of 
character. 

We  must  take  up  the  story  of  the  drama  with 
the  reign  of  James  and  with  the  contemporaries  of 
Shakespeare's  later  period,  though,  of  course,  a  treat- 
ment which  is  conditioned  by  the  order  of  develop- 
ment is  not  strictly  chronological,  and  some  of  the 
plays  we  shall  have  to  refer  to  belong  to  the  close 
of  the  sixteenth  century.  We  are  apt  to  forget 
that  alongside  Shakespeare  and  at  his  heels  other 
dramatists  were  supplying  material  for  the  theatre. 
The  influence  of  Marlowe,  and  particularly  of  Kyd, 
whose  Spanish  Tragedy  with  its  crude  mechanism 
of  ghosts  and  madness  and  revenge  caught  the 
popular  taste,  worked  itself  out  in  a  score  of 


THE   DRAMA  95 

journeymen  dramatists,  mere  hack  writers,  who 
turned  their  hand  to  plays  as  the  hacks  of  to-day 
turn  their  hand  to  novels,  and  with  no  more 
literary  merit  than  that  caught  as  an  echo  from 
better  men  than  themselves.  One  of  the  worst  of 
these — he  is  also  one  of  the  most  typical — was 
John  Marston,  a  purveyor  of  tragic  gloom  and 
sardonic  satire,  and  an  impostor  in  both,  whose 
tragedy  Antonio  and  Mellida  was  published  in  the 
same  year  as  Shakespeare's  Hamlet.  Both  plays 
owed  their  style  and  plot  to  the  same  tradition — 
the  tradition  created  by  Kyd's  Spanish  Tragedy — 
in  which  ghostly  promptings  to  revenge,  terrible 
crime,  and  a  feigned  madman  waiting  his  oppor- 
tunity are  the  elements  of  tragedy.  Nothing 
could  be  more  eloquent  as  evidence  of  the  rela- 
tions of  Shakespeare  to  his  age  than  a  comparison 
of  the  two.  The  style  of  Antonio  and  Mellida 
is  the  style  of  The  Murder  of  Gonzago.  There 
is  no  subtlety  nor  introspection,  the  pale  cast  of 
thought  falls  with  no  shadow  over  its  scenes,  And 
it  is  typical  of  a  score  of  plays  of  the  kind  we 
have  and,  beyond  doubt,  of  hundreds  that  have 
perished.  Shakespeare  stands  alone. 

Beside  this  journey-work  tragedy  of  revenge 
and  murder  which  had  its  root  through  Kyd  and 
Marlowe  in  Seneca  and  in  Italian  romance,  there 
was  a  journey-work  comedy  of  low  life  made  up  of 
loosely  constructed  strings  of  incidents,  buffoonery, 
and  romance,  that  had  its  roots  in  a  joyous  and 


96  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

fantastic  study  of  the  common  people.  These 
plays  are  happy  and  high-spirited  and,  compared 
with  the  ordinary  run  of  the  tragedies,  of  better 
workmanship.  They  deal  in  the  familiar  situations 
of  low  comedy — the  clown,  the  thrifty  citizen  and 
his  frivolous  wife,  the  gallant,  the  bawd,  the  good 
apprentice  and  the  bad,  portrayed  vigorously  and 
tersely  and  with  a  careless  kindly  gaiety  that  still 
charms  in  the  reading.  The  best  writers  in  this 
kind  were  Middleton  and  Dekker,  and  the  best 
play  to  read  as  a  sample  of  it  Eastward  Ho !  in 
which  Marston  put  off  his  affectation  of  sardonical 
melancholy  and  joined  with  Jonson  and  Dekker  and 
perhaps  Chapman  to  produce  what  is  the  masterpiece 
of  the  non- Shakespearean  comedy  of  the  time. 

For  all  our  habit  of  grouping  their  works  to- 
gether, it  is  a  far  cry  in  spirit  and  temperament 
from  the  dramatists  whose  heyday  was  under 
Elizabeth  to  those  who  reached  their  prime  under 
her  successor.  Quickly  though  insensibly  the 
temper  of  the  nation  suffered  eclipse.  The  high 
hopes  and  the  ardency  of  the  reign  of  Elizabeth 
saddened  into  a  profound  pessimism  and  gloom  in 
that  of  James.  This  apparition  of  unsought 
melancholy  has  been  widely  noted  and  generally 
assumed  to  be  inexplicable.  In  broad  outline 
its  causes  are  clear  enough.  "  To  travel  hopefully 
is  a  better  thing  than  to  arrive."  The  Elizabethans 
were,  if  ever  any  were,  hopeful  travellers.  The 
winds  blew  them  to  the  four  quarters  of  the  world  ; 


THE  DRAMA  97 

they  navigated  all  seas ;  they  sacked  rich  cities. 
They  beat  off  the  great  Armada,  and  harried  the 
very  coasts  of  Spain.  They  pushed  discovery  to 
the  ends  of  the  world  and  amassed  great  wealth. 
Under  James  all  these  things  were  over.  Peace 
was  made  with  Spain  :  national  pride  was  wounded 
by  the  solicitous  anxiety  of  the  King  for  a  Spanish 
marriage  for  the  heir  to  the  throne.  Sir  Walter 
Raleigh,  a  romantic  adventurer  lingering  beyond 
his  time,  was  beheaded  out  of  hand  by  the  un- 
generous timidity  of  the  monarch  to  whom  had 
been  transferred  devotion  and  loyalty  he  was 
unfitted  to  receive.  The  Court  which  had  been 
a  centre  of  flashing  and  gleaming  brilliance  de- 
generated into  a  knot  of  sycophants  humouring 
the  pragmatic  and  self-important  folly  of  a  king 
in  whom  had  implanted  themselves  all  the  vices 
of  the  Scots  and  none  of  their  virtues.  Nothing 
seemed  left  remarkable  beneath  the  visiting  moon. 
The  bright  day  was  done  and  they  were  for  the 
dark.  The  uprising  of  Puritanism  and  the  shadow 
of  impending  religious  strife  darkened  the  temper 
of  the  time. 

The  change  affected  all  literature,  and  particularly 
the  drama,  which,  because  it  appeals  to  what  all 
men  have  in  common,  commonly  reflects  soonest 
a  change  in  the  outlook  or  spirits  of  a  people.  The 
onslaughts  of  the  dramatists  on  the  Puritans, 
always  implacable  enemies  of  the  theatre,  became 
more  virulent  and  envenomed.  What  a  difference 


98  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

between  the  sunny  satire  of  Sir  Andrew  Aguecheek 
and  the  dark  animosity  of  The  Atheists'  Tragedy 
with  its  Languebeau  Snuffe  ready  to  carry  out  any 
villainy  proposed  to  him !  "I  speak,  sir,"  says  a 
lady  in  the  same  play  to  a  courtier  who  played 
with  her  in  an  attempt  to  carry  on  a  quick-witted, 
"  conceited  "  love  passage  in  the  vein  of  Much  Ado, 
"I  speak,  sir,  as  the  fashion  now  is,  in  earnest." 
The  quick-witted,  light-hearted  age  was  gone.  It 
is  natural  that  tragedy  reflected  this  melancholy 
in  its  deepest  form.  Gloom  deepened  and  had  no 
light  to  relieve  it,  men  supped  full  of  horrors- 
there  was  no  slackening  of  the  tension,  no  con- 
cession to  overwrought  nerves,  no  resting-place 
for  the  overwrought  soul.  It  is  in  the  dramatist 
John  Webster  that  this  new  spirit  has  its  most 
powerful  exponent. 

The  influence  of  Machiavelli,  which  had  given 
Marlowe  tragic  figures  that  were  bright  and 
splendid  and  burning,  smouldered  in  Webster  into 
a  duskier  and  intenser  heat.  His  fame  rests  on 
two  tragedies,  The  White  Devil  and  The  Duchess 
of  Malfi.  Both  are  stories  of  lust  and  crime,  full 
of  hate  and  hideous  vengeances,  and  through  each 

runs  a  vein  of  bitter  and  ironical  comment  on  men 
% 

and  women.  In  them  chance  plays  the  part  of 
fate.  "Blind  accident  and  blundering  mishap — 
*  such  a  mistake,'  says  one  of  the  criminals,  *  as  I 
have  often  seen  in  a  play' — are  the  steersmen  of 
their  fortunes  and  the  doomsmen  of  their  deeds." 


WILLIAM  SHAKESPEARE 

Chandos  portrait  from  the  National  Portrait  Gallery. 


THE   DRAMA  99 

His  characters  are  gloomy ;  meditative  and  philo- 
sophic murderers,  cynical  informers,  sad  and  loving 
women,  and  they  are  all  themselves  in  every  phrase 
that  they  utter.  But  they  are  studied  in  earnest- 
ness and  sincerity.  Unquestionably  he  is  the 
greatest  of  Shakespeare's  successors  in  the  romantic 
drama,  perhaps  his  only  direct  imitator.  He  has 
single  lines  worthy  to  set  beside  those  in  Othello 
or  King  Lear.  His  dirge  in  the  Duchess  of  Malfi 
Charles  Lamb  thought  worthy  to  be  set  beside  the 
ditty  in  The  Tempest  which  reminds  Ferdinand  of 
his  drowned  father.  "  As  that  is  of  the  water, 
watery,  so  this  is  of  the  earth,  earthy."  He  has 
earned  his  place  among  the  greatest  of  our 
dramatists  by  his  two  plays,  the  theme  of  which 
matched  his  sombre  genius  and  the  sombreness  of 
the  season  in  which  it  flowered. 

But  the  drama  could  not  survive  long  the  altered 
times,  and  the  voluminous  plays  of  Beaumont  and 
Fletcher  mark  the  beginning  of  the  end.  They  are 
the  decadence  of  Elizabethan  drama.  Decadence 
is  a  term  often  used  loosely  and  therefore  hard  to 
define,  but  we  may  say  broadly  that  an  art  is 
decadent  when  any  particular  one  of  the  elements 
which  go  to  its  making  occurs  in  excess  and 
disturbs^  the  x  balance  of  forces  which  keeps  the 
work  a  coherent  and  intact  whole.  Poetry  is 
decadent  when  the  sound  is  allowed  to  outrun  the 
sense,  or  when  the  suggestions,  say,  of  colour  which 
it  contains  are  allowed  to  crowd  out  its  deeper 


100  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

implications.     Thus  we  can   call  such  a  poem  as 
this  one,  well  known,  of  O'Shaughnessy's, 

"  We  are  the  music-makers, 
We  are  the  dreamers  of  dreams," 

decadent  because  it  conveys  nothing  but  the  mere 
delight  in  an  obvious  rhythm  of  words,  or  such  a 
poem  as  Morris's  "  Two  red  roses  across  the  moon," 
because  a  meaningless  refrain,  merely  pleasing  in 
its  word  texture,  breaks  in  at  intervals  on  the 
reader.  The  drama  of  Beaumont  and  Fletcher  is 
decadent  in  two  ways.  In  the  first  place,  those 
variations  and  licences  with  which  Shakespeare  in 
his  later  plays  diversified  the  blank  verse  handed 
on  to  him  by  Marlowe,  they  use  without  any 
restraint  or  measure.  "  Weak "  endings  and 
"  double  "  endings — i.e.  lines  which  end  either  on  a 
conjunction  or  preposition  or  some  other  unstressed 
word,  or  lines  in  which  there  is  a  syllable  too  many 
— abound  in  their  plays.  They  destroyed  blank 
verse  as  a  musical  and  resonant  poetic  instru- 
ment by  letting  this  element  of  variety  outrun  the 
sparing  and  skilful  use  which  alone  could  justify  it. 
But  they  were  decadent  in  other  and  deeper  ways 
than  that.  Sentiment  in  their  plays  usurps  the  ^ 
place  of  character.  Eloquent  and  moving  speeches 
and  fine  figures  are  no  longer  subservient  to  the* 
presentation  of  character  in  action,  but  are  set 
down  for  their  own  sake.  "  What  strange  self- 
trumpeters  and  tongue-bullies  all  the  brave  soldiers 
of  Beaumont  and  Fletcher  are ! "  said  Coleridge. 


THE   DRAMA  101 

When  they  die  they  die  to  the  music  of  their' own 
virtue.  When  dreadful  deeds  are  done  they  are 
described  not  with  that  authentic  and  lurid  vivid- 
ness which  throws  light  on  the  working  of  the 
human  heart  in  Shakespeare  or  Webster,  but  in 
tedious  rhetoric.  Resignation,  not  fortitude,  is  the 
authors'  forte,  and  they  play  upon  it  amazingly. 
The  sterner  tones  of  their  predecessors  melt  into 
the  long-drawn,  broken  accents  of  pathos  and  woe. 
This  delight  not  in  action  or  in  emotion  arising 
from  action,  but  in  passivity  of  suffering,  is  only 
one  aspect  of  a  certain  mental  flaccidity  in  grain. 
Shakespeare  may  be  free  and  even  coarse.  Beau- 
mont and  Fletcher  cultivate  indecency.  They  made  ^ 
their  subject  not  their  master  but  their  plaything, 
or  an  occasion  for  the  convenient  exercise  of  their 
own  powers  of  figure  and  rhetoric. 

Of  their  followers,  Massinger,  Ford,  and  Shirley, 
no  more  need  be  said  than  they  carried  one  step 
further  the  faults  of  their  masters.  Emotion  and 
tragic  passion  give  way  to  wiredrawn  sentiment. 
Tragedy  takes  on  the  air  of  a  masquerade.  With 
them  romantic  drama  died  a  natural  death,  and  the 
Puritans'  closing  of  the  theatre  only  gave  it  a  coup 
de  grace.  In  England  it  has  had  no  second  birth. 

(4) 

Outside  the  direct  romantic  succession  there 
worked  another  author  whose  lack  of  sympathy 
with  it,  as  well  as  his  close  connection  with  the  age 


102  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

which  followed,  justifies  his  separate  treatment. 
Ben  Jonson  shows  a  marked  contrast  to  Shake- 
speare in  his  character,  his  accomplishments,  and 
his  attitude  to  letters,  while  his  career  was  more 
varied  than  Shakespeare's  own.  The  first  "  classic  " 
in  English  writing,  he  was  a  "  romantic  "  in  action. 
In  his  adventurous  youth  he  was  by  turns  scholar, 
soldier,  bricklayer,  actor.  He  trailed  a  pike  with 
Leicester  in  the  Low  Countries  ;  on  his  return  to 
England  fought  a  duel  and  killed  his  man,  only 
escaping  hanging  by  benefit  of  clergy ;  at  the  end 
of  his  life  he  was  poet  laureate.  Such  a  career  is 
sufficiently  diversified,  and  it  forms  a  striking  con- 
trast to  the  plainness  and  severity  of  his  work.  But 
it  must  not  lead  us  to  forget  or  underestimate  his 
learning  and  knowledge.  Not  Gray  nor  Tennyson 
nor  Swinburne — perhaps  not  even  Milton — was  a 
better  scholar.  He  is  one  of  the  earliest  of  English 
writers  to  hold  and  express  different  theories  about 
literature.  He  consciously  appointed  himself  a 
teacher ;  was  a  missionary  of  literature  with  a 
definite  creed. 

But  though  in  a  general  way  his  dramatic 
principles  are  opposed  to  the  romantic  tendencies 
of  his  age,  he  is  by  no  means  blindly  classical.  He 
never  consented  to  be  bound  by  the  "  Unities  "- 
that  conception  of  dramatic  construction  evolved 
out  of  Aristotle  and  Horace  and  elaborated  in  the 
Renaissance  till,  in  its  strictest  form,  it  laid  down 
that  the  whole  scene  of  a  play  should  be  in  one 


THE   DRAMA  103 

place,  its  whole  action  deal  with  one  single  series 
of  events,  and  the  time  it  represented  as  elapsing 
be  no  greater  than  the  time  it  took  in  playing.  He 
was  always  pre-eminently  an  Englishman  of  his  own 
day  with  a  scholar's  rather  than  a  poet's  temper, 
hating  extravagance,  hating  bombast  and  cant,  and 
only  limited  because  in  ruling  out  these  things  he 
ruled  out  much  else  that  was  essential  to  the  spirit 
of  the  time.  Asa  craftsman  he  was  uncompromis- 
ing ;  he  never  bowed  to  the  tastes  of  the  public  and 
never  veiled  his  scorn  of  those — Shakespeare  among 
them — whom  he  conceived  to  do  so  ;  but  he  knew 
and  valued  his  own  work,  as  his  famous  last  word 
to  an  audience  who  might  be  unsympathetic  stands 
to  witness : 

"  By  God,  'tis  good,  and  if  you  like  it  you  may." 

Compare  the  temper  it  reveals  with  the  titles  of 
the  two  contemporary  comedies  of  his  gentler  and 
greater  brother,  the  one  As  You  Like  It,  the  other 
What  You  Will.  Of  the  two  attitudes  towards 
the  public,  and  they  might  stand  as  typical  of  two 
kinds  of  artists,  neither  perhaps  can  claim  complete 
sincerity.  A  truculent  and  noisy  disclaimer  of 
their  favours  is  not  a  bad  tone  to  assume  towards 
an  audience ;  in  the  end,  it  is  apt  to  succeed  as 
well  as  the  sub-ironical  compliance  which  is  its 
opposite. 

Jonson's  theory  of  comedy  and  the  consciousness 
with  which  he  set  it  against  the  practice  of  his  con- 


104  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

temporaries,  and  particularly  of  Shakespeare,  receive 
explicit  statement  in  the  prologue  to  Every  Man 
Out  of  His  Humour — one  of  his  earlier  plays.  "  I 
travail  with  another  objection,  Signor,  which  I  fear 
will  be  enforced  against  the  author  ere  I  can  be 
delivered  of  it,"  says  Mitis.  "  What's  that,  sir  ?  " 
replies  Cordatus.  Mitis :  "  That  the  argument 
of  his  comedy  might  have  been  of  some  other 
nature,  as  of  a  duke  to  be  in  love  with  a  countess, 
and  that  countess  to  be  in  love  with  the  duke's  son, 
and  the  son  to  love  the  lady's  waiting-maid  ;  some 
such  cross-wooing,  better  than  to  be  thus  near  and 
familiarly  allied  to  the  times."  Cordatus :  "  You 
say  well,  but  I  would  fain  hear  one  of  these  autumn- 
judgments  define  Quin  sit  comcedia  ?  If  he  cannot, 
let  him  concern  himself  with  Cicero's  definition,  till 
he  have  strength  to  propose  to  himself  a  better,  who 
would  have  a  comedy  to  be  imitatio  vitce,  speculum 
consuetudinis,  imago  veritatis ;  a  thing  throughout 
pleasant  and  ridiculous  and  accommodated  to  the 
correction  of  manners."  That  was  what  he  meant 
his  comedy  to  be,  and  so  he  conceived  the  popular 
comedy  of  the  day,  Twelfth  Night  and  Much  Ado. 
Shakespeare  might  play  with  dukes  and  countesses, 
serving- women  and  pages,  clowns  and  disguises ; 
he  would  come  down  more  near  and  ally  himself 
familiarly  with  the  times.  So  comedy  was  to  be 
medicinal,  to  purge  contemporary  London  of  its 
follies  and  its  sins ;  and  it  was  to  be  constructed 
with  regularity  and  elaboration,  respectful  to  the 


THE  DRAMA  105 

Unities  if  not  ruled  by  them,  and  built  up  of 
characters  each  the  embodiment  of  some  "  humour  " 
or  eccentricity,  and  each,  when  his  eccentricity  is 
displaying  itself  at  its  fullest,  outwitted  and  ex- 
posed. This  conception  of  "  humours,"  based  on  a 
physiology  which  was  already  obsolescent,  takes 
heavily  from  the  realism  of  Jonson's  methods,  nor 
does  his  use  of  a  careful  vocabulary  of  contemporary 
colloquialism  and  slang  save  him  from  a  certain 
dryness  and  tediousness  to  modern  readers.  The 
truth  is  he  was  less  a  satirist  of  contemporary 
manners  than  a  satirist  in  the  abstract  who  followed 
the  models  of  classical  writers  in  this  style,  and  he 
found  the  vices  and  follies  of  his  own  day  hardly 
adequate  to  the  intricacy  and  elaborateness  of  the 
plots  which  he  constructed  for  their  exposure.  At 
the  first  glance  his  people  are  contemporary  types, 
at  the  second  they  betray  themselves  for  what  they 
are  really — cock-shies  set  up  by  the  new  comedy  of 
Greece  that  every  "  classical "  satirist  in  Rome  or 
France  or  England  has  had  his  shot  at  since.  One 
wonders  whether  Ben  Jonson,  for  all  his  satirical 
intention,  had  as  much  observation — as  much  of  an 
eye  for  contemporary  types — as  Shakespeare's  rustics 
and  roysterers  prove  him  to  have  had.  It  follows 
that  all  but  one  or  two  of  his  plays,  when  they  are 
put  on  the  stage  to-day,  are  apt  to  come  to  one  with 
a  sense  of  remoteness  and  other- worldliness  which 
we  hardly  feel  with  Shakespeare  or  Moliere.  His 
muse  moves  along  the  highroad  of  comedy  which 


106  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

is  the  Roman  road,  and  she  carries  in  her  train 
types  that  have  done  service  to  many  since  the 
ancients  fashioned  them  years  ago.  Jealous 
husbands,  foolish  pragmatic  fathers,  a  dissolute 
son,  a  boastful  soldier,  a  cunning  slave — they  all 
are  merely  counters  by  which  the  game  of  comedy 
used  to  be  played.  In  England,  since  Shakespeare 
took  his  hold  on  the  stage,  that  road  has  been 
stopped  for  us,  that  game  has  ceased  to  amuse. 

Ben  Jonson,  then,  in  a  certain  degree  failed  in 
his  intention.  Had  he  kept  closer  to  contemporary 
life,  instead  of  merely  grafting  on  to  it  types  he  had 
learned  from  books,  he  might  have  made  himself  an 
English  Moliere — without  Moliere's  breadth  and  / 
clarity,  but  with  a  corresponding  vigour  and 
strength  which  would  have  kept  his  work  sweet. 
And  he  might  have  founded  a  school  of  comedy 
that  would  have  got  its  roots  deeper  into  our 
national  life  than  the  trivial  and  licentious  Restora- 
tion comedy  ever  succeeded  in  doing.  As  it  is, 
his  importance  is  mostly  historical.  One  must 
credit  him  with  being  the  first  of  the  English 
"  classics  " — the  forerunner  of  the  age  which  gave 
us  Dryden  and  Swift  and  Pope.  Perhaps  that 
is  enough  in  his  praise. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE   SEVENTEENTH   CENTURY 


WITH  the  seventeenth  century  the  great  school  of 
imaginative  writers  that  made  glorious  the  last 
years  of  Elizabeth's  reign  had  passed  away. 
Spenser  was  dead  before  1600,  Sir  Philip  Sidney  a 
dozen  years  earlier  ;  and  though  Shakespeare  and 
Drayton  and  many  other  men  whom  we  class 
roughly  as  Elizabethan  lived  on  to  work  under 
James,  their  temper  and  their  ideals  belong  to 
the  earlier  day.  The  seventeenth  century,  not  in 
England  only  but  in  Europe,  brought  a  new  way 
of  thinking  with  it,  and  gave  a  new  direction  to 
human  interest  and  to  human  affairs.  It  is  not 
perhaps  easy  to  define,  nor  is  it  visible  in  the  greater 
writers  of  the  time.  Milton,  for  instance,  and  even 
Sir  Thomas  Browne  are  both  of  them  too  big,  and 
in  their  genius  too  far  separated  from  their  fellows, 
to  give  us  much  clue  to  altered  conditions.  It  is 
commonly  in  the  work  of  lesser  and  forgotten 
writers  that  the  spirit  of  an  age  has  it  fullest  ex- 
pression. Genius  is  a  law  to  itself;  it  moves  in 
another  dimension  ;  it  is  out  of  time.  To  define 

107 


108  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

this  seventeenth- century  spirit,  then,  one  must  look 
at  the  literature  of  the  age  as  a  whole.  What  is 
there  that  one  finds  in  it  which  marks  a  change  in 
temperament  and  outlook  from  the  Renaissance, 
and  from  the  time  which  immediately  followed  it  ? 
Putting  it  very  broadly,  one  may  say  that  litera- 
ture in  the  seventeenth  century  becomes  for  the 
first  time  essentially  modern  in  spirit.  We  begin 
calling  literature  "  modern "  at  the  Renaissance 
because  the  discovery  of  the  New  World,  and  the 
widening  of  human  experience  and  knowledge 
which  that  and  the  revival  of  classical  learning  im- 
plied, mark  a  definite  break  from  a  way  of  thought 
which  had  been  continuous  since  the  break-up  of 
the  Roman  Empire.  The  men  of  the  Renaissance 
felt  themselves  to  be  modern.  They  started  afresh, 
owing  nothing  to  their  immediate  forebears  except 
Chaucer,  and  even  when  they  talked  of  him  they  did 
so  in  very  much  the  same  accent  as  we  do  to-day. 
He  was  mediaeval  and  remote  ;  the  interest  which  he 
possessed  was  a  purely  literary  interest ;  his  readers 
did  not  meet  him  easily  on  the  same  plane  of 
thought,  or  forget  the  lapse  of  time  which  separated 
him  from  them.  And  in  another  way,  too.  the 
Renaissance  began  modern  writing.  Inflections 
had  been  dropped.  The  revival  of  the  classics  had 
enriched  our  vocabulary,  and  the  English  language, 
after  a  gradual  impoverishment  which  followed  the 
obsolescence  one  after  another  of  the  local  dialects, 
attained  a  fairly  fixed  form.  There  is  more  differ- 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     109 

ence  between  the  language  of  the  English  writings 
of  Sir  Thomas  More  and  that  of  the  prose  of 
Chaucer  than  there  is  between  that  of  More  and  of 
Ruskin.  But  it  is  not  till  the  seventeenth  century 
that  the  modern  spirit,  in  the  fullest  sense  of  the 
word,  comes  into  being.  Defined,  it  means  a  spirit 
of  observation,  of  preoccupation  with  detail,  of 
stress  laid  on  matter  of  fact,  of  analysis  of  feelings 
and  mental  processes,  of  free  argument  upon  insti- 
tutions and  government.  In  relation  to  knowledge, 
it  is  the  spirit  of  science ;  and  the  study  of  science, 
which  is  the  essential  intellectual  fact  in  modern  ^  / 
history,  dates  from  just  this  time,  from  Bacon  and 
Newton  and  Descartes.  In  relation  to  literature, 
it  is  the  spirit  of  criticism  ;  and  criticism  in  England 
is  the  creation  of  the  seventeenth  century.  The 
positive  temper,  the  attitude  of  realism,  is  every- 
where in  the  ascendant.  The  sixteenth  century  \ 
made  voyages  of  discovery;  the  seventeenth  sat 
down  to  take  stock  of  the  riches  it  had  gathered. 
For  the  first  time  in  English  literature  writing  be- 
comes a  vehicle  for  storing  and  conveying  facts. 

It  would  be  easy  to  give  instances :  one  is 
sufficient  here.  Biography,  which  is  one  of  the 
most  characteristic  kinds  of  English  writing,  was 
unknown  to  the  moderns  as  late  as  the  sixteenth 
century.  Partly  the  awakened  interest  in  the 
careers  of  the  ancient  statesmen  and  soldiers  which 
the  study  of  Plutarch  had  excited,  and  partly  the 
general  interest  in  and  craving  for  facts,  set  men 


110  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

writing  down  the  lives  of  their  fellows.     The  earliest 
English  biographies  date  from  this  time.     In  the 
beginning  they  were  concerned,  like  the  Lives  of 
Plutarch,  with  men  of  action  ;  and  when  Sir  Fulke 
Greville   wrote  a  brief  account  of  his   friend   Sir 
Philip  Sidney,  it  was  the  courtier  and  the  soldier, 
and  not  the  author,  that  he  designed  to  celebrate. 
But  soon  men  of  letters  came  within  their  scope ; 
and  though  the  interest  in  the  lives  of  authors  came 
too  late  to  give  us  the  contemporary  life  of  Shake- 
speare we  so  much  long  for,  it  was  early  enough 
to  make  possible  those  masterpieces  of  condensed 
biography    in    which    Isaak     Walton     celebrates 
Herbert  and  Donne.     Fuller  and  Aubrey,  to  name 
only  two  authors,  spent  lives  of  laborious  industry 
in   hunting  down   and    chronicling    the    smallest 
facts  about  the  worthies  of  their  day  and  the  time 
immediately  before  them.     Autobiography  followed 
where  biography  led.     Lord  Herbert  of  Cherbury 
and  Margaret  Duchess  of  Newcastle,  as  well  as  less 
reputable  persons,  followed   the   new   mode.     By 
the  time  of  the   Restoration   Pepys   and   Evelyn 
were  keeping  their  diaries,  and  Fox  his  journal- 
Evelyn  perhaps  consciously  for  the  sake  of  pos- 
terity, Pepys  and  Fox  for  themselves.      Just  as 
in  poetry  the  lyric,  that  is  the  expression  of  personal 
feeling,  became  more  widely  practised,  more  subtle 
and  more  sincere,  in  prose  the  letter,  the  journal, 
and  the  autobiography  formed  themselves  to  meet 
the  new  and  growing  demand  for  analysis  of  the 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     111 

feelings  and  the  intimate  thoughts  and  sensations  of 
real  men  and  women.  A  minor  form  of  literature 
which  had  a  brief  but  popular  vogue  ministered 
less  directly  to  the  same  need.  The  "  Character," 
a  brief  descriptive  essay  on  a  contemporary  type — 
a  tobacco-seller,  an  old  college  butler,  or  the  like— 
was  popular  because  in  its  own  way  it  matched  the 
newly  awakened  taste  for  realism  and  fact.  The 
drama,  which  in  the  hands  of  Ben  Jonson  had 
attacked  folly  and  wickedness  proper  to  no  place 
or  time,  descended  to  the  drawing-rooms  of  the 
day,  and  Congreve  occupied  himself  with  the  por- 
trayal of  the  social  frauds  and  foolishnesses  per- 
petrated by  actual  living  men  and  women  of 
fashion  in  contemporary  London.  Satire  ceased 
to  be  a  mere  expression  of  a  vague  discontent,  and 
became  a  weapon  against  opposing  men  and1*" 
policies.  Readers  of  the  new  generation  were 
nothing  if  not  critical.  They  were  for  testing 
directly  institutions,  whether  they  were  literary, 
social,  or  political.  They  wanted  facts,  and  they 
wanted  to  take  a  side. 

In  the  distinct  and  separate  realm  of  poetry  a 
revolution  no  less  remarkable  took  place.  Spenser 
had  been  both  a  poet  and  a  Puritan :  he  had  de- 
signed to  show  by  his  great  poem  the  training  and 
fashioning  of  a  Puritan  English  gentleman.  But 
the  alliance  between  poetry  and  Puritanism  which 
he  typified  failed  to  survive  his  death.  The  essen- 
tially pagan  spirit  of  the  Renaissance  which  caused 


112  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

him  no  doubts  nor  difficulties  proved  too  strong 
for  his  readers  and  his  followers,  and  the  eman- 
cipated artistic  enthusiasm  in  which  it  worked 
alienated  from  secular  poetry  men  with  deep  and 
strong  religious  convictions.  Religion  and  morality 
and  poetry,  which  in  Sidney  and  Spenser  had  gone 
hand  in  hand,  separated  from  each  other.  Poems 
like  Venus  and  Adonis  or  like  Shakespeare's  sonnets 
could  hardly  be  squared  with  the  sterner  temper 
which  persecution  began  to  breed.  Even  within 
orthodox  Anglicanism  poetry  and  religion  began 
to  be  deemed  no  fit  company  for  each  other. 
When  George  Herbert  left  off  courtier  and  took 
orders  he  burnt  his  earlier  love  poetry,  and  only 
the  persuasion  of  his  friends  prevented  Donne 
from  following  the  same  course.  Pure  poetry 
became  more  and  more  an  exotic.  All  Milton's 
belongs  to  his  earlier  youth;  his  middle  age  was 
occupied  with  controversy  and  propaganda  in 
prose ;  when  he  returned  to  poetry  in  blindness 
and  old  age  it  was  "  to  justify  the  ways  of  God  to 
man" — to  use  poetry,  that  is,  for  a  spiritual  and 
moral  rather  than  an  artistic  end. 

Though  the  age  was  curious  and  inquiring, 
though  poetry  and  prose  tended  more  and  more 
to  be  enlisted  in  the  service  of  non-artistic  en- 
thusiasms and  to  be  made  the  vehicle  of  deeper 
emotions  and  interests  than  perhaps  a  northern 
people  could  ever  find  in  art,  pure  and  simple,  it 
was  not,  like  the  time  that  followed  it,  a  "  prosaic  " 


THE   SEVENTEENTH   CENTURY  113 

age.  Enthusiasm  burned  fierce  and  clear,  display- 
ing itself  in  the  passionate  polemic  of  Milton,  in 
the  fanaticism  of  Bunyan  and  Fox,  hardly  more 
than  in  the  gentle,  steadfast  search  for  knowledge 
of  Burton  and  the  wide  and  vigilant  curiosity  of 
Bacon.  Its  eager  experimentalism  tried  the  im- 
possible ;  wrote  poems  and  then  gave  them  a 
weight  of  meaning  they  could  not  carry,  as  when 
Fletcher  in  The  Purple  Island  designed  to  allegorize 
all  that  the  physiology  of  his  day  knew  of  the 
human  body,  or  Donne  sought  to  convey  abstruse 
scientific  fact  in  a  lyric.  It  gave  men  a  passion  for 
pure  learning,  set  Jonson  to  turn  himself  from  a 
bricklayer  into  the  best  equipped  scholar  of  his 
day,  and  Fuller  and  Camden  grubbing  among 
English  records  and  gathering  for  the  first  time 
materials  of  scientific  value  for  English  history. 
Enthusiasm  gave  us  poetry  that  was  at  once  full 
of  learning  and  of  imagination,  poetry  that  was 
harsh  and  brutal  in  its  roughness  and  at  the  same 
time  impassioned.  And  it  set  up  a  school  of  prose 
that  combined  colloquial  readiness  and  fluency, 
pregnancy  and  high  sentiment  with  a  cumbrous 
pedantry  of  learning  which  was  the  fruit  of  its  own 
excess. 

The  form  in  which  enthusiasm  manifested  itself 
most  fiercely  was,  as  we  have  seen,  not  favourable 
to  literature.  Puritanism  drove  itself  like  a  wedge 
into  the  art  of  the  time,  broadening  as  it  went. 

Had  there  been  no   more   in   it  than   the   moral 

8 


114  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

earnestness  and  religiousness  of  Sidney  and  Spenser, 
Cavalier  would  not  have  differed  from  Roundhead, 
and  there  might  have  been  no  civil  war ;  each 
party  was  endowed  deeply  with  the  religious  sense 
and  Charles  I.  was  a  sincerely  pious  man.  But 
while  Spenser  and  Sidney  held  that  although  life 
as  a  preparation  for  eternity  must  be  ordered  and 
strenuous  and  devout,  and  care  for  the  hereafter  was 
not  incompatible  with  a  frank  and  full  enjoyment  of 
life  as  it  is  lived,  Puritanism  as  it  developed  in  the 
middle  classes  became  a  sterner  and  darker  creed. 
The  doctrine  of  original  sin,  face  to  face  with  the 
fact  that  art,  like  other  pleasures,  was  naturally 
and  readily  entered  into  and  enjoyed,  forced  them 
to  the  plain  conclusion  that  art  was  an  evil  thing. 
As  early  as  Shakespeare's  youth  they  had  been 
strong  enough  to  keep  the  theatres  outside  London 
walls ;  at  the  time  of  the  Civil  War  they  closed 
them  altogether,  and  the  feud  which  had  lasted  for 
over  a  generation  between  them  and  the  dramatists 
ended  in  the  destruction  of  the  literary  drama.  In 
the  brief  years  of  their  ascendancy  they  produced 
no  literature,  for  Milton  is  much  too  large  to  be 
tied  down  to  their  negative  creed,  and,  indeed,  in 
many  of  his  qualities,  his  love  of  music  and  his 
sensuousness  in  description,  for  instance,  he  is 
antagonistic  to  the  temper  of  his  day.  With  the 
Restoration  their  earnest  and  strenuous  spirit  fled 
to  America.  It  is  noteworthy  that  it  had  no 
literary  manifestation  there  till  two  centuries  after u 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     115 

the  time  of  its  passage.  Hawthorne's  novels  are 
the  fruit — the  one  ripe  fruit  in  art — of  the  Puritan 
imagination. 

(2) 

If  the  reader  adopts  the  seventeenth-century 
habit  himself  and  takes  stock  of  what  the  Eliza- 
bethans accomplished  in  poetry,  he  will  recognize 
speedily  that  their  work  reached  various  stages  of 
completeness.  They  perfected  the  poetic  drama 
and  its  instrument,  blank  verse ;  they  perfected, 
though  not  in  the  severer  Italian  form,  the  sonnet ; 
they  wTrote  with  extraordinary  delicacy  and  finish 
short  lyrics  in  which  a  simple  and  freer  manner 
drawn  from  the  classics  took  the  place  of  the 
mediaeval  intricacies  of  the  ballad  and  the  rondeau. 
And  in  the  forms  which  they  failed  to  bring 
to  perfection  they  did  beautiful  and  noble  work. 
The  splendour  of  The  Faerie  Queen  is  in  separate 
passages ;  as  a  whole  it  is  over-tortuous  and  slow  ; 
its  affectations,  its  sensuousness,  the  mere  difficulty 
of  reading  it,  makes  us  feel  it  a  collection  of  great 
passages,  strung  it  is  true  on  a  large  conception, 
rather  than  a  great  work.  The  Elizabethans,  that 
is,  had  not  discovered  the  secret  of  the  long  poem  ; 
the  abstract  idea  of  the  "  heroic  "  epic  which  was 
in  all  their  minds  had  to  wait  for  embodiment  till 
Paradise  Lost.  In  a  way  their  treatment  of  the 
pastoral  or  eclogue  form  was  imperfect  too.  They 
used  it  well,  but  not  so  well  as  their  models,  Vergil 


116  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

and  Theocritus ;  they  had  not  quite  mastered  the 
convention  on  which  it  is  built. 

The  seventeenth  century,  taking  stock  in  some 
such  fashion  of  its  artistic  possessions,  found  some 
things  it  were  vain  to  try  to  do.  It  could  add 
nothing  to  the  accomplishment  of  the  English 
sonnet,  so  it  hardly  tried:  with  the  exception  of 
a  few  sonnets  in  the  Italian  form  of  Milton,  the 
century  can  show  us  nothing  in  this  mode  of  verse. 
The  literary  drama  was  brought  to  perfection  in 
the  early  years  of  it  by  the  surviving  Elizabethans ; 
later  decades  could  add  nothing  to  it  but  licence, 
and  as  we  saw,  the  licences  they  added  hastened 
its  destruction.  But  in  other  forms  the  poets  of 
the  new  time  experimented  eagerly,  and  in  the 
stress  of  experiment,  poetry  which  under  Elizabeth 
had  been  integral  and  coherent  split  into  different 
schools.  As  the  period  of  the  Renaissance  was 
also  that  of  the  Reformation,  it  was  only  natural  a 
determined  effort  should  sooner  or  later  be  made 
to  use  poetry  for  religious  purposes.  The  earliest 
English  hymn-writing,  our  first  devotional  verse 
in  the  vernacular,  belongs  to  this  time,  and  a 
Catholic  and  religious  school  of  lyricism  grew 
and  flourished  beside  the  pagan  neo-classical 
writers.  From  the  tumult  of  experiment  three 
schools  disengage  themselves,  the  school  of 
Spenser,  the  school  of  Jonson,  and  the  school  of 
Donne. 

At  the  outset  of  the  century  Spenser's  influence 


THE   SEVENTEENTH   CENTURY  117 

was  triumphant   and   predominant ;    his  was   the 
main  stream  with  which  the  other  poetic  influences 
of  the  time  merely   mingled.     His   popularity  is 
referable  to  qualities  other  than  those   which  be- 
longed peculiarly  to  his  talent  as  a  poet.     Puritans 
loved  his  religious  ardour,  and   in   those   Puritan 
households  where  the  stricter  conception   of  the 
diabolical  nature  of  all  poetry  had  not  penetrated, 
his  works  were  read — standing  on  a  shelf,  may  be, 
between  the   new  translation   of    the   Bible   and 
Sylvester's   translation   of    the    French    poet    Du 
Bartas'  work  on  the  creation,  which  had  a  large 
popularity  at  that  time  as  "  family  reading."     Pro- 
bably the  Puritans  were  as  blind  to  the  sensuous- 
ness  of  Spenser's  language   and   imagery  as   they 
were  (and  are)  to  the  same  qualities  in  the  Bible 
itself.     The  Faerie   Queen   would   easily   achieve 
innocuousness  amongst  those  who  can  find  nothing 
but  an  allegory  of  the  Church  in  the  "  Song  of 
Songs."     His  followers  made  their  allegory  a  great 
deal  plainer  than  he  had  done  his.     In  his  poem 
called    The    Purple    Island,   Phineas   Fletcher,   a 
Puritan  imitator  of  Spenser  in  Cambridge,  essayed 
to  set  forth  the  struggle  of  the  soul  at  grip  with 
evil,  a  battle   in   which   the   body — the   "  Purple 
Island  "  —is  the  field.     To  a  modern  reader  it  is  a 
desolating  and  at  times  a  mildly  amusing  book,  in 
which  everything  from  the  liver  to  the  seven  deadly 
sins   is   personified  ;   in  which  after  four  books  of 
allegorized  contemporary  anatomy  and  physiology, 


118  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

the  will  (Voletta)  engages  in  a  struggle  with  Satan 
and  conquers  by  the  help  of  Christ  and  King 
James  !  The  allegory  is  clever — too  clever — and 
the  author  can  paint  a  pleasant  picture,  but  on  the 
whole  he  was  happier  in  his  pastoral  work.  His 
brother  Giles  made  a  better  attempt  at  the  Spen- 
serian manner.  His  long  poem,  Christ's  Victory 
and  Death,  shows  for  all  its  carefully  Protestant 
tone  high  qualities  of  mysticism  ;  across  'it  Spenser 
and  Milton  join  hands. 

It  was,  however,  in  pastoral  poetry  that  Spenser's 
influence  found  its  pleasantest  outlet.  One  might 
hesitate  to  advise  a  reader  to  embark  on  either  of 
the  Fletchers.  There  is  no  reason  why  any  modern 
should  not  read  and  enjoy  Browne  or  Wither,  in 
whose  softly  flowing  verse  the  sweetness  and  con- 
tentment of  the  countryside,  that  "  merry  England  " 
which  was  the  background  of  all  sectarian  and 
intellectual  strife  and  labour,  finds  as  in  a  placid 
stream  a  calm  reflection  and  picture  of  itself. 
The  seventeenth  century  gave  birth  to  many  things 
that  only  came  to  maturity  in  the  nineteenth ;  if 
you  care  for  that  kind  of  literary  study  which 
searches  out  origins  and  digs  for  hints  and  models 
of  accepted  styles,  you  will  find  in  Browne  that 
which  influenced  more  than  any  other  single  thing 
the  early  work  of  Keats.  Browne  has  another 
claim  to  immortality;  if  it  be  true,  as  is  now 
thought,  that  he  was  the  author  of  the  epitaph  on 
the  Countess  of  Pembroke : 


THE   SEVENTEENTH   CENTURY  119 

"  Underneath  this  sable  hearse 
Lies  the  subject  of  all  verse, 
Sidney's  sister,  Pembroke's  mother. 
Death,  ere  thou  hast  slain  another 
Fair  and  learned  and  good  as  she, 
Time  shall  throw  a  dart  at  thee" — 

then  he  achieved  the  miracle  of  a  quintessential 
statement  of  the  spirit  of  the  English  Renaissance. 
For  the  breath  of  it  stirs  in  these  slow  quiet 
moving  lines,  and  its  few  and  simple  words  im- 
plicate the  soul  of  a  period. 

By  the  end  of  the  first  quarter  of  the  century 
the  influence  of  Spenser  and  the  school  which 
worked  under  it  had  died  out.  Its  place  was  c 
taken  by  the  twin  schools  of  Jonson  and  Donne. 
Jonson's  poetic  method  is  something  like  his 
dramatic  ;  he  formed  himself  as  exactly  as  possible 
on  classical  models.  Horace  had  written  satires  ^ 
and  elegies,  and  epistles  and  complimentary  verses, 
and  Jonson  quite  consciously  and  deliberately 
followed  where  Horace  led.  He  wrote  elegies  on 
the  great,  letters  and  courtly  compliments  and 
love-lyrics  to  his  friends,  satires  with  an  air  of 
general  censure.  But  though  he  was  classical,  his 
style  was  never  latinized.  In  all  of  them  he  strove 
to  pour  into  an  ancient  form  language  that  was  as 
intense  and  vigorous  and  as  purely  English  as  the 
earliest  trumpeters  of  the  Renaissance  in  England 
could  have  wished.  The  result  is  not  entirely 
successful.  He  seldom  fails  to  reproduce  classic 
dignity  and  good  sense;  on  the  other  hand,  he 


120  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

seldom  succeeds  in  achieving  classic  grace  and 
ease.  Occasionally,  as  in  his  best-known  lyric 
"  Drink  to  me  only  with  thine  eyes,"  he  is  perfect 
and  achieves  an  air  of  spontaneity  little  short  of 
marvellous,  when  we  know  that  his  images  and 
even  his  words  in  the  song  are  all  plagiarized 
from  other  men.  His  expression  is  always  clear 
and  vigorous  and  his  sense  good  and  noble.  The 
native  earnestness  and  sincerity  of  the  man  shines 
through  as  it  does  in  his  dramas  and  his  prose.  In 
an  age  of  fantastic  and  meaningless  eulogy — eulogy 
so  amazing  in  its  unexpectedness  and  abstruseness 
that  the  wonder  is  not  so  much  that  it  should  have 
been  written  as  that  it  could  have  been  thought  of 
— Jonson  maintains  his  personal  dignity  and  his 
good  sense.  You  feel  his  compliments  are  such  as 
the  best  should  be,  not  necessarily  understood  and 
properly  valued  by  the  public,  but  of  a  discrim- 
inating sort  that  by  their  very  comprehending 
sincerity  would  be  most  warmly  appreciated  by 
the  people  to  whom  they  were  addressed.  His 
verses  to  Shakespeare,  and  his  prose  commentaries 
on  him  too,  are  models  of  what  self-respecting 
admiration  should  be,  generous  in  its  praise  of 
excellence,  candid  in  its  statement  of  defects.  They 
are  the  kind  of  compliments  that  Shakespeare  him- 
self, if  he  had  grace  enough,  must  have  loved  to 
receive. 

Very  different   from    his   direct    and    dignified 
manner  is  the  closely  packed  style  of  Donne,  who, 


BENJAMIN  JONSON. 
From  the  portrait  after  G.  Honthorst  in  the  N&tion.d  Poitra.it  Gallery. 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     121 

Milton  apart,  is  the  greatest  English  writer  of  the 
century,  though  his  obscurity  has  kept  him  out  of 
general  reading.  No  poetry  in  English,  not  even 
Browning's,  is  more  difficult  to  understand.  The 
obscurity  of  Donne  and  Browning  proceed  from 
such  similar  causes  that  they  are  worth  examining 
together.  In  both,  as  in  the  obscure  passages  in 
Shakespeare's  later  plays,  obscurity  arises  not 
because  the  poet  says  too  little  but  because  he 
attempts  to  say  too  much.  He  huddles  a  new 
thought  on  the  one  before  it,  before  the  first  has 
had  time  to  express  itself ;  he  sees  things  or  analyses 
emotions  so  swiftly  and  subtly  himself  that  he 
forgets  the  slower  comprehensions  of  his  readers ; 
he  is  for  analysing  things  far  deeper  than  the 
ordinary  mind  commonly  can.  His  wide  and 
curious  knowledge  finds  terms  and  likenesses  to 
express  his  meaning  unknown  to  us  ;  he  sees  things 
from  a  dozen  points  of  view  at  once  and  tumbles  a 
hint  of  each  separate  vision  in  a  heap  out  on  to  the 
page;  his  restless  intellect  finds  new  and  subtler 
shades  of  emotion  and  thought  invisible  to  other 
pairs  of  eyes,  and  cannot,  because  speech  is  modelled 
on  the  average  of  our  intelligences,  find  words  to 
express  them  ;  he  is  always  trembling  on  the  brink 
of  the  inarticulate.  All  this  applies  to  both  Donne 
and  Browning,  and  the  comparison  could  be  pushed 
further  still.  Both  draw  the  knowledge  which  is 
the  main  cause  of  their  obscurity  from  the  same 
source,  the  bypaths  of  medievalism.  Browning's 


ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Sordello  is  obscure  because  he  knows  too  much 
about  mediaeval  Italian  history  ;  Donne's  Anniver- 
sary because  he  is  too  deeply  read  in  mediaeval 
scholasticism  and  speculation.  Both  make  them- 
selves more  difficult  to  the  reader  who  is  familiar 
with  the  poetry  of  their  contemporaries  by  the 
disconcerting  freshness  of  their  point  of  view. 
Seventeenth-century  love  poetry  was  idyllic  and 
idealist ;  Donne's  is  passionate  and  realistic  to  the 
point  of  cynicism.  To  read  him  after  reading 
Browne  and  Jonson  is  to  have  the  same  shock  as 
reading  Browning  after  Tennyson.  Both  poets  are 
salutary  in  the  strong  and  biting  antidote  they 
bring  to  sentimentalism  in  thought  and  melodious 
facility  in  writing.  They  are  the  corrective  of  lazy 
thinking  and  lazy  composition. 

Elizabethan  love  poetry  was  written  on  a  con- 
vention which,  though  it  was  used  with  manliness 
and  entire  sincerity  by  Sidney,  did  not  escape  the 
fate  of  its  kind.  Dante's  love  for  Beatrice, 
Petrarch's  for  Laura,  the  gallant  and  passionate 
adoration  of  Sidney  for  his  Stella,  became  the 
models  for  a  dismal  succession  of  imaginary  woes. 
They  were  all  figments  of  the  mind,  perhaps  hardly 
that;  they  all  use  the  same  terms  and  write  in 
fixed  strains,  epicurean  and  sensuous  like  Ronsard, 
ideal  and  intellectualized  like  Dante,  sentimental 
and  adoring  like  Petrarch.  Into  this  enclosed 
garden  of  sentiment  and  illusion  Donne  burst 
passionately  and  rudely,  pulling  up  the  gay- 


JOHN   DONNE. 
From  a  painting  in  the  Dyce  dr»  Foster  collection 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     123 

coloured  tangled  weeds  that  choked  thoughts, 
planting,  as  one  of  his  followers  said,  the  seeds  of 
fresh  invention.  Where  his  forerunners  had  been 
idealist,  epicurean,  or  adoring,  he  was  brutal, 
cynical,  and  immitigably  realist.  He  could  begin 
a  poem,  "For  God's  sake  hold  your  tongue  and 
let  me  love  " ;  he  could  be  as  resolutely  free  from 
illusion  as  Shakespeare  when  he  addressed  his 
Dark  Lady — 

"  Hope  not  for  mind  in  women ;  at  their  best, 
Sweetness  and  wit  they're  but  mummy  possest." 

And  where  the  sonneteers  pretended  to  a  sincerity 
which  was  none  of  theirs,  he  was,  like  Browning, 
unaffectedly  a  dramatic  lyrist.  "  I  did  best,"  he 
said,  "  when  I  had  least  truth  for  my  subject." 

His  love  poetry  was  written  in  his  turbulent  and 
brilliant  youth,  and  the  poetic  talent  which  made 
it  turned  in  his  later  years  to  express  itself  in 
hymns  and  religious  poetry.  But  there  is  no 
essential  distinction  between  the  two  halves  of  his 
work.  It  is  all  of  a  piece.  The  same  swift  and 
subtle  spirit  which  analyses  experiences  of  passion, 
analyses,  in  his  later  poetry,  those  of  religion. 
His  devotional  poems,  though  they  probe  and 
question,  are  none  the  less  never  sermons,  but 
rather  confessions  or  prayers.  His  intense  indivi- 
duality, eager  always,  as  his  best  critic  has  said,1 

1  Prof.  H.  J.  C.  Grierson  in  the  Cambridge  History  of  English 
Literature.  His  criticism  there  and  his  recent  edition  of  Donne's 
poetical  works  have  added  immeasurably  to  our  knowledge  of 
the  poet. 


ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

"  to  find  a  North- West  passage  of  his  own,"  pressed 
its  curious  and  sceptical  questioning  into  every 
corner  of  love  and  life  and  religion,  explored  un- 
suspected depths,  exploited  new  discovered  para- 
doxes, and  turned  its  discoveries  always  into 
poetry  of  the  closely-packed  artificial  style  which 
was  all  its  own.  Simplicity  indeed  would  have 
been  for  him  an  affectation ;  his  elaborateness  is 
not  like  that  of  his  followers,  constructed  painfully 
in  a  vicious  desire  to  compass  the  unexpected,  but 
the  natural  overflow  of  an  amazingly  fertile  and 
ingenious  mind.  The  curiosity,  the  desire  for 
truth,  the  search  after  minute  and  detailed  know- 
ledge of  his  age,  is  all  in  his  verse.  He  bears  the 
spirit  of  his  time  not  less  markedly  than  Bacon 
does,  or  Newton,  or  Descartes. 

The  work  of  the  followers  of  Donne  and  Jonson 
leads  straight  to  the  new  school,  Jonson's  by 
giving  that  school  a  model  on  which  to  work, 
Donne's  by  producing  an  era  of  extravagance  and 
absurdity  which  made  a  literary  revolution  impera- 
tive. The  school  of  Donne — the  "fantastics"  as 
they  have  been  called  (Dr  Johnson  called  them  the 
metaphysical  poets) — produced  in  Herbert  and 
Vaughan,  our  two  noblest  writers  of  religious  verse, 
the  flower  of  a  mode  of  writing  which  ended  in  the 
somewhat  exotic  religiousness  of  Crashaw.  In  the 
hands  of  Cowley  the  use  of  far-sought  and  intricate 
imagery  became  a  trick,  and  the  fantastic  school, 
the  soul  of  sincerity  gone  out  of  it,  died  when  he 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     125 

died.  To  the  followers  of  Jonson  we  owe  that 
delightful  and  simple  lyric  poetry  which  fills  our 
anthologies,  their  courtly  lyricism  receiving  a  new 
impulse  in  the  intenser  loyalty  of  troubled  times. 
The  most  finished  of  them  is  perhaps  Carew ;  the 
best,  because  of  the  freshness  and  variety  of  his 
subject-matter  and  his  easy  grace,  Herrick.  At 
the  end  of  them  came  Waller  and  gave  to  the  five-  v 
accented  rhymed  verse  (the  heroic  couplet)  that 
trick  of  regularity  and  balance  which  gave  us  the 
classical  school. 

(3) 

The  prose  literature  of  the  seventeenth  century 
is  extraordinarily  rich  and  varied,  and  a  study  of  it 
would  cover  a  wide  field  of  human  knowledge. 
The  new  and  unsuspected  harmonies  discovered  by 
the  Elizabethans  were  applied  indeed  to  all  the 
tasks  of  which  prose  is  capable,  from  telling  stories 
to  setting  down  the  results  of  the  speculation  which 
was  revolutionizing  science  and  philosophy.  For 
the  first  time  the  vernacular  and  not  Latin  became 
the  language  of  scientific  research,  and  though 
Bacon  in  his  Novum  Organum  adhered  to  the  older 
mode,  its  disappearance  was  rapid.  English  was 
proving  itself  too  flexible  an  instrument  for  convey- 
ing ideas  to  be  longer  neglected.  It  was  applied 
too  to  preaching  of  a  more  formal  and  grandiose 
kind  than  the  plain  and  homely  Latimer  ever 
dreamed  of.  The  preachers,  though  their  golden- 


126  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

mouthed  oratory,  which  blended  in  its  combination 
of  vigour  and  cadence  the  euphuistic  and  colloquial 
styles  of  the  Elizabethans,  is  in  itself  a  glory  of 
English  literature,  belong  by  their  matter  too  ex- 
clusively to  the  province  of  Church  history  to  be 
dealt  with  here.  The  men  of  science  and  philosophy, 
Newton,  Hobbes,  and  Locke,  are  in  a  like  way 
outside  our  province.  For  the  purpose  of  the 
literary  student  the  achievement  of  the  seventeenth 
century  can  be  judged  in  four  separate  men  or 
books — in  the  Bible,  in  Francis  Bacon,  and  in 
Burton  and  Browne. 

In  a  way  the  Bible,  like  the  preachers,  lies  outside 
the  domain  of  literary  study  in  the  narrow  sense ; 
but  its  sheer  literary  magnitude,  the  abiding 
significance  of  it  in  our  subsequent  history,  social, 
political,  and  artistic  as  well  as  religious,  compel  us 
to  turn  aside  to  examine  the  causes  that  have  pro- 
duced such  great  results.  The  Authorized  Version 
is  not,  of  course,  a  purely  seventeenth-century 
work.  Though  the  scholars l  who  wrote  and  com- 
piled it  had  before  them  all  the  previous  vernacular 
texts  and  chose  the  best  readings  where  they 
found  them  or  devised  new  ones  in  accordance 
with  the  original,  the  basis  is  undoubtedly  the 
Tudor  version  of  Tindall.  It  has,  none  the  less, 
the  qualities  of  the  time  of  its  publication.  It 
could  hardly  have  been  done  earlier ;  had  it  been 

1  There  is  a  graphic  little  pen-picture  of  their  method  in 
Selden's  Table  Talk. 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     127 

so,  it  would  not  have  been  done  half  so  well.  In 
it  English  has  lost  both  its  roughness  and  its 
affectation  and  retained  its  strength ;  the  Bible  is 
the  supreme  example  of  early  English  prose  style. 
The  reason  is  not  far  to  seek.  Of  all  recipes  for 
good  or  noble  writing  that  which  enjoins  the  writer 
to  be  careful  about  the  matter  and  never  mind 
the  manner,  is  the  most  sure.  The  translators 
had  the  handling  of  matter  of  the  gravest  dignity 
and  momentousness,  and  their  sense  of  reverence 
kept  them  right  in  their  treatment  of  it.  They 
cared  passionately  for  the  truth  ;  they  were  virtually 
anonymous  and  not  ambitious  of  originality  or 
literary  fame  ;  they  had  no  desire  to  stand  between 
the  book  and  its  readers.  It  followed  that  they 
cultivated  that  naked  plainness  and  spareness 
which  makes  their  work  supreme.  The  Authorized 
Version  is  the  last  and  greatest  of  those  English 
translations  which  were  the  fruit  of  Renaissance 
scholarship  and  pioneering.  It  is  the  first  and 
greatest  piece  of  English  prose. 

Its  influence  is  one  of  those  things  on  which  it 
is  profitless  to  comment  or  enlarge  simply  because 
they  are  an  understood  part  of  every  man's  ex- 
perience. In  its  own  time  it  helped  to  weld 
England,  for  where  before  one  Bible  was  read  at 
home  and  another  in  churches,  all  now  read  the 
new  version.  Its  supremacy  was  instantaneous 
and  unchallenged,  and  it  quickly  coloured  speech 
and  literature ;  it  could  produce  a  Bunyan  in  the 


128  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

century  of  its  birth.  To  it  belongs  the  native 
dignity  and  eloquence  of  peasant  speech.  It  runs 
like  a  golden  thread  through  all  our  writing  sub- 
sequent to  its  coming ;  men  so  diverse  as  Huxley 
and  Carlyle  have  paid  their  tribute  to  its  power ; 
Ruskin  counted  it  the  one  essential  part  of  his 
education.  It  will  be  a  bad  day  for  the  mere 
quality  of  our  language  when  it  ceases  to  be  read. 

At  the  time  the  translators  were  sitting,  Francis 
Bacon  was  at  the  height  of  his  fame.  By  pro- 
fession a  lawyer — time-serving  and  over-compliant 
to  wealth  and  influence — he  gives  singularly  little 
evidence  of  it  in  the  style  of  his  books.  Lawyers, 
from  the  necessity  they  are  under  of  exerting  per- 
suasion, of  planting  an  unfamiliar  argument  in 
the  minds  of  hearers  of  whose  favour  they  are 
doubtful,  but  whose  sympathy  they  must  gain, 
are  usually  of  purpose  diffuse.  They  cultivate  the 
gift,  possessed  by  Edmund  Burke  above  all  other 
English  authors,  of  putting  the  same  thing  freshly 
and  in  different  forms  a  great  many  times  in  suc- 
cession. They  value  copiousness  and  fertility  of 
illustration.  Nothing  could  be  more  unlike  this 
normal  legal  manner  than  the  style  of  Bacon. 
"  No  man,"  says  Ben  Jonson,  speaking  in  one  of 
those  vivid  little  notes  of  his,  of  his  oratorical 
method,  "  no  man  ever  coughed  or  turned  aside 
from  him  without  loss."  He  is  a  master  of  the 
aphoristic  style.  He  compresses  his  wisdom  into 
the  quintessential  form  of  an  epigram  ;  so  complete 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     129 

and  concentrated  is  his  form  of  statement,  so 
shortly  is  everything  put,  that  the  mere  transition 
from  one  thought  to  another  gives  his  prose  a 
curious  air  of  disjointedness  as  if  he  flitted  arbi- 
trarily from  one  thing  to  another,  and  jotted 
down  anything  that  came  into  his  head.  His 
writing  has  clarity  and  lucidity,  it  abounds  in 
terseness  of  expression  and  in  exact  and  discrimi- 
nating phraseology,  and  in  the  minor  arts  of 
composition — in  the  use  of  quotations,  for  instance 
— it  can  be  extraordinarily  felicitous.  But  it  lacks 
spaciousness  and  ease  and  rhythm ;  it  makes  too 
inexorable  a  demand  on  the  attention,  and  the 
harassed  reader  soon  finds  himself  longing  for 
those  breathing  spaces  which  consideration  or 
perhaps  looseness  of  thought  has  implanted  in 
the  prose  of  other  writers. 

His  Essays,  the  work  by  which  he  is  best  known, 
were  in  their  origin  merely  jottings  gradually 
cohered  and  enlarged  into  the  series  we  know. 
In  them  he  had  the  advantage  of  a  subject  which 
he  had  studied  closely  through  life.  He  counted 
himself  a  master  in  the  art  of  managing  men, 
and  "Human  Nature  and  how  to  manage  it" 
would  be  a  good  title  for  his  book.  Men  are 
studied  in  the  spirit  of  Machiavelli,  whose  philo-.^ 
sophy  of  government  appealed  so  powerfully  to 
the  Elizabethan  mind.  Taken  together,  the  essays 
which  deal  with  public  matters  are  in  effect  a 
kind  of  manual  for  statesmen  and  princes,  in- 


130  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

structing  them  how  to  acquire  power  and  how  to 
keep  it,  deliberating  how  far  they  may  go  safely 
in  the  direction  of  self-interest,  and  to  what 
degree  the  principle  of  self-interest  must  be  sub- 
ordinated to  the  wider  interests  of  the  people 
who  are  ruled.  Democracy,  which  in  England 
was  to  make  its  splendid  beginnings  in  the  seven- 
teenth century,  finds  little  to  foretell  it  in  the 
works  of  Bacon.  Though  he  never  advocates 
cruelty  or  oppression  and  is  wise  enough  to  see 
that  no  statesman  can  entirely  set  aside  moral 
considerations,  his  ethical  tone  is  hardly  elevating ; 
the  moral  obliquity  of  his  public  life  is  to  a  certain 
extent  explained,  in  all  but  its  grosser  elements, 
by  his  published  writings.  The  essays,  of  course, 
contain  much  more  than  this ;  the  spirit  of  curious 
and  restless  enquiry  which  animated  Bacon  finds 
expression  in  those  on  "  Health,"  or  "  Gardens," 
and  "  Plantations,"  and  others  of  the  kind ;  and 
a  deeper  vein  of  earnestness  runs  through  some 
of  them — those  for  instance  on  "  Friendship,"  or 
"  Truth,"  and  on  "  Death." 

The  Essays  sum  up  in  a  condensed  form  the 
intellectual  interests  which  find  larger  treatment 
in  his  other  works.  His  Henry  VII.,  the  first 
piece  of  scientific  history  in  the  English  language 
(indeed  in  the  modern  world)  is  concerned  with  a 
king  whose  practice  was  the  outcome  of  a  political 
theory  identical  with  Bacon's  own.  The  Advance- 
ment of  Learning  is  a  brilliant  popular  exposition 


THE   SEVENTEENTH   CENTURY  131 

of  the  cause  of  scientific  enquiry  and  of  the  in- 
ductive or  investigatory  method  of  research.  The 
New  Atlantis  is  the  picture  of  an  ideal  community 
whose  common  purpose  is  scientific  investigation. 
Bacon's  name  is  not  upon  the  roll  of  those  who 
have  enlarged  by  brilliant  conjectures  or  discoveries 
the  store  of  human  knowledge  ;  his  own  investiga- 
tions so  far  as  they  are  recorded  are  all  of  a  trivial 
nature.  The  truth  about  him  is  that  he  was  a 
brilliantly  clever  populariser  of  the  cause  of  science, 
a  kind  of  seventeenth-century  Huxley,  concerned 
rather  to  lay  down  large  general  principles  for  the 
guidance  of  the  work  of  others,  than  to  be  a  worker 
in  research  himself.  The  superstition  of  later 
times,  acting  on  and  refracting  his  amazing  intel- 
lectual gifts,  has  raised  him  to  a  godlike  eminence 
which  is  by  right  none  of  his  ;  it  has  even  credited 
him  with  the  authorship  of  Shakespeare's  plays, 
and  in  its  wilder  moments  with  the  composition  of 
all  that  is  of  supreme  worth  in  Elizabethan  litera- 
ture. It  is  not  necessary  to  take  these  delusions 
seriously.  The  ignorance  of  medievalism  was  in 
the  habit  of  crediting  Vergil  with  the  construction 
of  the  Roman  aqueducts  and  temples  whose  ruins 
aje  scattered  over  Europe.  The  modern  Baconians 
reach  much  the  same  intellectual  level. 

A  similar  enthusiasm  for  knowledge  and  at  any 
rate  a  pretence  to  science  belong  to  the  author  of 
the  Anatomy  of  Melancholy,  Robert  Burton.  His 
one  book  is  surely  the  most  amazing  in  English 


132  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

prose.  His  professed  object  was  simple  and  com- 
prehensive ;  it  was  to  analyse  human  melancholy, 
to  describe  its  effects,  and  prescribe  for  its  removal. 
But  as  his  task  grew,  melancholy  came  to  mean  to 
Burton  all  the  ills  that  flesh  is  heir  to.  He  tracked 
it  in  obscure  and  unsuspected  forms ;  drew  illus- 
trations from  a  range  of  authors  so  much  wider 
than  the  compass  of  the  reading  of  even  the  most 
learned  since,  that  he  has  until  lately  been 
commonly  credited  with  the  invention  of  a  large 
part  of  his  quotations.  Ancients  and  moderns, 
poets  and  prose  writers,  schoolmen  and  dramatists 
are  all  drawn  upon  for  the  copious  store  of  his 
examples;  they  are  always  cited  with  an  air  of 
quietly  humorous  shrewdness  in  the  comments 
and  enclosed  in  a  prose  that  is  straightforward, 
simple  and  vigorous,  and  can  on  occasion  command 
both  rhythm  and  beauty  of  phrase.  It  is  a  mistake 
to  regard  Burton  from  the  point  of  view  (taught  us 
first  by  Charles  Lamb)  of  tolerant  or  loving  delight 
in  quaintness  for  quaintness'  sake.  His  book  is 
anything  but  scientific  in  form,  but  it  is  far  from 
being  the  work  of  a  recluse  or  a  fool.  Behind  his 
lack  of  system,  he  takes  a  broad  and  psychologically 
an  essentially  just  view  of  human  ills,  and  modern 
medicine  has  gone  far  in  its  admiration  of  what  is 
at  bottom  a  most  comprehensive  and  subtle  treatise 
in  diagnosis. 

A  writer  of  a  very  different  quality  is  Sir  Thomas 
Browne.     Of  all  the  men  of  his  time,  he  is  the  only 


THE   SEVENTEENTH   CENTURY  183 

one  of  whom  one  can  say  for  certain  that  he  held 
the  manner  of  saying  a  thing  more  important  than 
the  thing  said.  He  is  our  first  deliberate  and 
conscious  stylist,  the  forerunner  of  Charles  Lamb, 
of  Stevenson  (whose  Ftrgimbus  Puerisque  is 
modelled  on  his  method  of  treatment)  and  of  the 
stylistic  school  of  our  own  day.  His  eloquence  is 
too  studied  to  rise  to  the  greatest  heights,  and  his 
speculation,  though  curious  and  discursive,  never 
really  results  in  deep  thinking.  He  is  content  to 
embroider  his  pattern  out  of  the  stray  fancies  of  an 
imaginative  nature.  His  best  known  work,  the 
Religio  Medici,  is  a  random  confession  of  belief  and 
thoughts,  full  of  the  inconsequent  speculations  of 
a  man  with  some  knowledge  of  science  but  not 
deeply  or  earnestly  interested  about  it,  content 
rather  to  follow  the  wayward  imaginations  of  a 
mind  naturally  gifted  with  a  certain  poetic  quality, 
than  to  engage  in  serious  intellectual  exercise. 
Such  work  could  never  maintain  its  hold  on  taste 
if  it  were  not  carefully  finished  and  constructed 
with  elaborate  care.  Browne,  if  he  was  not  a  great 
writer,  was  a  literary  artist  of  a  high  quality.  He 
exploits  a  quaint  and  lovable  egoism  with  extra- 
ordinary skill ;  and  though  his  delicately  figured 
and  latinized  sentences  commonly  sound  platitudin- 
ous and  trivial  when  they  are  translated  into  rough 
Saxon  prose,  as  they  stand  they  are  rich  and  melo- 
dious enough.  Bunyan  belongs  rather  to  the 
special  history  of  the  novel,  and  it  will  be  con- 


134  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

venient  to   postpone    dealing   with    him   till    we 

reach  it. 

(4) 

In  a  century  of  surpassing  richness  in  prose  and 
poetry,  one  author  stands  by  himself.  John  Milton 
refuses  to  be  classed  with  any  of  the  schools. 
Though  Dryden  tells  us  Milton  confessed  to  him 
that  Spenser  was  his  "  original,"  he  has  no  connec- 
tion— other  than  a  general  similarity  of  purpose, 
moral  and  religious — with  Spenser's  followers.  To 
the  "  fantastics  "  he  paid  in  his  youth  the  doubtful 
compliment  of  one  or  two  half- contemptuous 
imitations  and  never  touched  them  again.  He  had 
no  turn  for  the  love  lyrics  or  the  courtliness  of  the 
school  of  Jonson.  In  everything  he  did  he  was 
himself  and  his  own  master ;  he  devised  his  own 
subjects  and  wrote  his  own  style.  He  stands  alone 
and  must  be  judged  alone. 

No  author,  however,  can  ever  escape  from  the 
influences  of  his  time,  and,  just  as  much  as  his 
lesser  contemporaries,  Milton  has  his  place  in 
literary  history  and  derives  from  the  great  original 
impulse  which  set  in  motion  all  the  enterprises  of 
the  century.  He  is  the  last  and  greatest  figure  in 
the  English  Renaissance.  The  new  passion  for  art 
and  letters  which  in  its  earnest  fumbling  beginnings 
gave  us  the  prose  of  Cheke  and  Ascham  and  the 
poetry  of  Surrey  and  Sackville,  comes  to  a  full  and 
splendid  and  perfect  end  in  his  work.  In  it  the 
Renaissance  and  the  Reformation,  imperfectly  fused 


THE  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY     135 

by  Sidney  and  Spenser,  blend  in  their  just  propor- 
tions. The  transplantation  into  English  of  classical 
forms,  which  had  been  the  aim  of  Sidney  and  the 
endeavour  of  Jonson,  he  finally  accomplished ;  in 
his  work  the  dream  of  all  the  poets  of  the  Renais- 
sance— the  "  heroic  "  poem — finds  its  fulfilment. 
There  was  no  poet  of  the  time  but  wanted  to  do 
for  his  country  what  Vergil  had  planned  to  do  for 
Rome,  to  sing  its  origins,  and  to  celebrate  its 
morality  and  its  citizenship  in  the  epic  form. 
Spenser  had  tried  it  in  The  Faerie  Queen  and  failed 
splendidly.  Where  he  failed,  Milton  succeeded, 
though  his  poem  is  not  on  the  origins  of  England 
but  on  the  ultimate  subject  of  the  origins  of  man- 
kind. We  know  from  his  notebooks  that  he  turned 
over  in  his  mind  a  national  subject  and  that  the 
Arthurian  legend  for  a  while  appealed  to  him. 
But  to  Milton's  earnest  temper  nothing  that  was 
not  true  was  a  fit  subject  for  poetry.  It  was 
inevitable  he  should  lay  it  aside.  The  Arthurian 
story  he  knew  to  be  a  myth,  and  a  myth  was  a  lie ; 
the  story  of  the  Fall,  on  the  other  hand,  he  accepted 
in  common  with  his  time  for  literal  fact.  It  is  to 
be  noted  as  characteristic  of  his  confident  and 
assured  egotism  that  he  accepted  no  less  sincerely 
and  literally  the  imaginative  structure  which  he 
himself  reared  on  it.  However  that  may  be,  the 
solid  fact  about  him  is  that  in  this  "  adventurous 
song  "  with  its  pursuit  of 

"  Things  unattempted  yet  in  prose  or  rhyme," 


136  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

he  succeeded  in  his  attempt,  that  alone  among 
the  moderns  he  contrived  to  write  an  epic  which 
stands  on  the  same  eminence  as  the  ancient  ^ 
writings  of  the  kind,  and  that  he  found  time,  in  a 
life  which  hardly  extended  to  old  age  as  we  know 
it,  to  write,  besides  noble  lyrics  and  a  series  of 
fiercely  argumentative  prose  treatises,  two  other 
masterpieces  in  the  grand  style,  a  tragedy  modelled 
on  the  Greeks  and  a  second  epic  on  the  "  compact " 
style  of  the  book  of  Job.  No  English  poet  can 
compare  with  him  in  majesty  or  completeness. 

An  adequate  study  of  his  achievement  is  im- 
possible within  the  limits  of  the  few  pages  that  are 
all  a  book  like  this  can  spare  to  a  single  author. 
Readers  who  desire  it  will  find  it  in  the  work  of  his 
two  best  critics,  Mark  Pattison  and  Prof.  Walter 
Raleigh.1  All  that  can  be  done  here  is  to  call 
attention  to  some  of  his  most  striking  qualities. 
Foremost,  of  course,  is  the  temper  of  the  man. 
From  the  beginning  he  was  sure  of  himself  and  ' 
sure  of  his  mission ;  he  had  his  purpose  plain  and 
clear.  There  is  no  mental  development,  hardly, 
visible  in  his  work,  only  training,  undertaken 
anxiously  and  prayerfully  and  with  a  clearly  con- 
ceived end.  He  designed  to  write  a  masterpiece 
and  he  would  not  start  till  he  was  ready.  The 
first  twenty  years  of  his  life  were  spent  in  assiduous 
reading ;  for  twenty  more  he  was  immersed  in  the 
dust  and  toil  of  political  conflict,  using  his  pen 

i  "Milton"  (E.M.L.),  and  "Milton"  (Edward  Arnold). 


THE   SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY  137 

and  his  extraordinary  equipment  of  learning  and 
eloquence  to  defend  the  cause  of  liberty,  civil  and 
religious,  and  to  attack  its  enemies ;  not  till  he 
was  past  middle  age  had  he  reached  the  leisure  and 
the  preparedness  necessary  to  accomplish  his  self- 
imposed  work.  But  all  the  time,  as  we  know,  he 
had  it  in  his  mind,  and  he  used  every  form  of  self- 
discipline,  physical  and  intellectual,  to  fit  himself  for 
its  accomplishment.  "  Long  it  was  not,"  he  could 
write,  "  when  I  was  confirmed  in  this  opinion,  that 
he  who  would  not  be  frustrate  of  his  hope  to  write 
well  hereafter  in  laudable  things,  ought  himself  to 
be  a  true  poem  ;  that  is  a  composition  and  pattern 
of  the  best  and  honourablest  things  ;  not  presuming 
to  sing  high  praises  of  heroic  men,  or  famous  cities, 
unless  he  have  in  himself  the  experience  and 
practice  of  all  that  which  is  praiseworthy."  In 
Lycidas,  written  in  his  Cambridge  days,  he 
apologizes  to  his  readers  for  plucking  the  fruit  of 
his  poetry  before  it  is  ripe.  In  passage  after 
passage  in  his  prose  works  he  begs  for  his  reader's 
patience  for  a  little  while  longer  till  his  preparation 
be  complete.  When  the  time  came  at  last  for 
beginning  he  was  in  no  doubt ;  in  his  very  opening 
lines  he  intends,  he  says,  to  soar  no  "middle 
flight."  This  self-assured  unrelenting  certainty  of 
his,  carried  into  his  prose  essays  in  argument,  pro- 
duces sometimes  strange  results.  One  is  peculiarly 
interesting  to  us  now  in  view  of  current  contro- 
versy. He  was  unhappily  married,  and  because  he 


138  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

was  unhappy  the  law  of  divorce  must  be  changed. 
A  modern — George  Eliot  for  instance — would  have 
pleaded  the  artistic  temperament  and  been  content 
to  remain  outside  the  law.  Milton  always  argued 
from  himself  to  mankind  at  large.  His  wife  would 
not  talk  to  him,  and  so,  an  incorrigible  "  muteness  " 
and  a  desertion  such  as  hers  was  to  be  a  general 
ground  of  divorce. 

In  everything  he  did,  he  put  forth  all  his  strength. 
Each  of  his  poems,  long  or  short,  is  by  itself  a 
perfect  whole,  wrought  complete.  The  reader 
always  must  feel  that  the  planning  of  each  is  the 
work  of  conscious,  deliberate,  and  selecting  art. 
Milton  never  digresses ;  he  never  violates  the 
harmony  of  sound  or  sense ;  his  poems  have  all 
their  regular  movement,  from  quiet  beginning 
through  a  rising  and  breaking  wave  of  passion 
and  splendour  to  quiet  close.  His  art  is  nowhere 
better  seen  than  in  his  endings. 

Is  it  Lycidas  ?  After  the  thunder  of  approaching 
vengeance  on  the  hireling  shepherds  of  the  Church, 
comes  sunset  and  quiet : 

"  And  now  the  sun  had  stretch'd  out  all  the  hills, 
And  now  was  dropt  into  the  western  bay ; 
At  last  he  rose,  and  twitched  his  mantle  blue : 
To-morrow  to  fresh  woods  and  pastures  new." 

Is  it  Paradise  Lost  ?  After  the  agonies  of  ex- 
pulsion and  the  flaming  sword — 

"  Some  natural  tears  they  drop'd,  but  wip'd  them  soon  ; 
The  world  was  all  before  them  where  to  choose 


THE   SEVENTEENTH   CENTURY  139 

Their  place  of  rest,  and  Providence  their  guide ; 
They  hand  in  hand  with  wandering  steps  and  slow, 
Through  Eden  took  their  solitary  way." 

Is  it,  finally,  Samson  Agonistes  ? 

"  His  servants  he  with  new  acquist, 
Of  true  experience  from  this  great  event, 
With  peace  and  consolation  hath  dismist, 
And  calm  of  mind,  all  passion  spent." 

"Calm  of  mind,  all  passion  spent,"  it  is  the 
essence  of  Milton's  art. 

Yet  Milton  would  not  have  assented  to  any 
criticism  which  sought  to  regard  him  merely  as  an 
artist.  His  prose  works  are  avowedly  polemical 
in  character;  so  in  a  certain  sense  is  Samson 
Agonistes ;  Paradise  Lost  starts  with  an  avowed 
dogmatic  aim  ;  openly  intending  to 

"  Assert  eternal  providence, 
And  justify  the  ways  of  God  to  man." 

It  intends,  that  is,  to  deal  with  the  dark  and 
difficult  problem  of  human  destiny;  to  explain 
man's  disobedience  and  the  fruit  of  it,  to  make 
clear  heaven's  purposes  and  man's  failure  to  come 
up  to  them,  and  to  give  us  such  a  conception  of 
things  divine  and  human  as  we  can  sincerely 
accept,  trust,  and  believe  in.  To  what  extent  does 
Milton  succeed  in  this  aim?  A  modern  reader 
finds  the  question  difficult  to  answer  without 
offence.  To  the  vaguer  and  less  certain  way  of 
thinking  which  the  nineteenth  century  taught  us, 
his  scheme  of  the  universe  appears  inconceivably 


140  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

artificial,  and  it  is  difficult  to  understand  how  he 
could  have  believed  in  the  reality  of  something  so 
obviously  the  result  of  his  own  ingenuity  as  his 
"  geography  "  (if  an  extension  of  the  word  be  per- 
mitted) of  heaven  and  hell.  In  some  ways  his  life 
incapacitated  him  from  approaching  his  subject 
from  our  modern  point  of  view.  A  scholar  by  up- 
bringing and  profession,  and  solitary  in  his  old  age, 
his  business  in  his  prime  fixed  his  attention  on  great 
affairs,  and  if  he  was  not  an  actor  in  revolution  he 
was  at  least  a  servant  and  confidant  of  the  actors. 
He  had  watched  with  eager  sympathy  arduous 
political  debate,  of  a  kind  more  momentous  than 
anything  of  the  kind  could  be  to  us  now,  and  he 
knew  how  surely,  when  something  bigger  and  more 
instant  than  the  mere  clash  of  party  is  afoot,  what 
is  said  will  mirror  the  mind  of  the  speaker.  It  is 
this  vivid  experience  shining  through  it  which  gives 
reality  and  force  to  the  second  book  of  his  great 
poem,  when  Satan  and  his  followers  hold  their 
council  in  Hell.  Without  it,  this  part  of  the  poem 
could  not  possibly  have  been  so  magnificent  and 
awe-inspiring ;  but  without  it  the  poem  as  a  whole 
might  have  been  more  easily  accepted  by  posterity 
in  its  contents,  as  well  as  in  its  style.  The  truth  is, 
Milton  made  the  Fall  of  the  Angels  a  political 
transaction,  and  though  the  exigencies  of  his  subject 
forced  him  for  once  to  be  on  the  side  of  absolute 
monarchy,  his  latent  enthusiasm  for  revolt  made 
him  make  the  rebellious  element — Satan  and  his 


THE   SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY  HI 

crew — more  interesting,  and  so  disturbed  the  balance 
of  his  poem.  "  Satan  may  have  been  wrong,  but 
on  Milton's  theory  he  had  an  arguable  case  at  least. 
There  was  something  arbitrary  in  the  promotion ; 
there  were  little  symptoms  of  a  job ;  in  Paradise 
Lost  it  is  always  clear  that  the  devils  are  the 
weaker,  but  it  is  never  clear  that  the  angels  are  the 
better.  Milton's  sympathy  and  his  imagination 
slip  back  to  the  Puritan  rebels  whom  he  loved,  and 
desert  the  courtly  angels  whom  he  could  not  love 
although  he  praised."1 

Dr  Johnson  said  that,  after  all,  Paradise  Lost 
was  one  of  the  books  which  no  one  wished  larger  ; 
probably  he  was  right.  But  "  after  all,"  too,  what 
book  in  the  whole  range  of  modern  literature  is 
really  greater?  What  other  poet  has  devised  a 
style  so  full  and  dignified,  so  firm  and  continuous 
in  its  music,  so  fitted  to  keep  out  the  intrusion  of 
mean  associations  which  might  imperil  the  serious- 
ness of  its  theme,  so  impregnated  with  a  moral 
and  artistic  tenacity,  so  compact  of  sublimity  and 
strength  ? 

1  Walter  Bagehot :  Essay  on  Milton. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE    AGE    OF    GOOD    SENSE 

(1) 

THE  student  of  literature,  when  he  passes  in  his 
reading  from  the  age  of  Shakespeare  and  Milton 
to  that  of  Dryden  and  Pope,  will  be  conscious  of 
certain  sharply  defined  differences  between  the 
temper  and  styles  of  the  writers  of  the  two  periods. 
If  besides  being  a  student  of  literature  he  is  also 
a  student  of  literary  criticism,  he  will  find  that 
these  differences  have  led  to  the  affixing  of  certain 
labels — that  the  school  to  which  writers  of  the 
former  period  belong  is  called  "  Romantic "  and 
that  of  the  latter  "  Classic,"  this  "  Classic  "  school 
being  again  overthrown  towards  the  end  of  the 
eighteenth  century  by  a  set  of  writers  who,  unlike 
the  Elizabethans,  gave  the  name  "  Romantic  "  to 
themselves.  What  is  he  to  understand  by  these 
two  labels  ?  what  are  the  characteristics  of 
"  Classicism,"  and  how  far  is  it  opposite  to  and 
conflicting  with  "  Romanticism  "  ?  The  question 
is  difficult  because  the  names  are  used  vaguely  and 
they  do  not  adequately  cover  everything  that  is 
commonly  put  under  them.  It  would  be  difficult, 

142 


THE   AGE   OF   GOOD   SENSE  143 

for  instance,  to  find  anything  in  Ben  Jonson  which 
proclaims  him  as  belonging  to  a  different  school  from 
Dryden,  and  perhaps  the  same  could  be  said  in  the 
second  and  self-styled  period  of  Romanticism  of  the 
work  of  Crabbe.  But  in  the  main  the  differences 
are  real  and  easily  visible,  even  though  they  hardly 
convince  us  that  the  names  chosen  are  the  happiest 
that  could  be  found  by  way  of  description. 

This  period  of  Dryden  and  Pope  on  which 
we  are  now  entering  sometimes  styled  itself  the 
Augustan  Age  of  English  poetry.  It  grounded 
its  claim  to  Classicism  on  a  fancied  resemblance 
to  the  Roman  poets  of  the  golden  age  of  Latin 
poetry,  the  reign  of  the  Emperor  Augustus.  Its 
authors  saw  themselves  each  as  a  second  Vergil,  a 
second  Ovid,  most  of  all  a  second  Horace,  and  they 
believed  that  their  relation  to  the  big  world,  their 
assured  position  in  society,  heightened  the  re- 
semblances. They  endeavoured  to  form  their 
poetry  on  the  lines  laid  down  in  the  critical  writing 
of  the  original  Augustan  age  as  elaborated  and 
interpreted  in  Renaissance  criticism.  It  was  tacitly 
assumed — some  of  them  openly  asserted  it — that 
the  kinds,  modes  of  treatment  and  all  the  minor 
details  of  literature,  figures  of  speech,  use  of  epithets 
and  the  rest,  had  been  settled  by  the  ancients  once 
and  for  all.  What  the  Greeks  began  the  critics 
and  authors  of  the  time  of  Augustus  had  settled  in 
its  completed  form,  and  the  scholars  of  the  Re- 
naissance had  only  interpreted  their  findings  for 


144  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

modern  use.  There  was  the  tragedy,  which  had 
certain  proper  parts  and  a  certain  fixed  order  of 
treatment  laid  down  for  it ;  there  was  the  heroic 
poem,  which  had  a  story  or  "  fable,"  which  must  be 
treated  in  a  certain  fixed  manner,  and  so  on.  The 

//authors  of  the  "  Classic  "  period  so  christened  them- 
selves because  they  observed  these  rules.  And 
they  fancied  that  they  had  the  temper  of  the 
Augustan  time — the  temper  displayed  in  the 
works  of  Horace  more  than  in  those  of  anyone 
else — its  urbanity  (English  literature  in  their 
hands  became  for  the  first  time  an  affair  of  the 

v  towns),  its  love  of  good  sense  and  moderation,  its 
instinctive  distrust  of  emotion,  and  its  invincible 
good  breeding.  If  you  had  asked  them  to  state 
as  simply  and  broadly  as  possible  their  purpose, 

Ahey  would  have  said  it  was  to  follow  nature  ;  and 
if  you  had  enquired  what  they  meant  by  nature, 
it  would  turn  out  that  they  thought  of  it  mainly 
as  the  opposite  of  art  and  the  negation  of  what 
was  fantastic,  tortured,  or  far-sought  in  thinking 
or  writing.  The  later  "  Romantic  "  Revival,  when 
it  called  itself  a  return  to  nature,  was  only  claim- 
ing the  intention  which  the  classical  school  itself 
had  proclaimed  as  its  main  endeavour.  The  ex- 
planation of  that  paradox  we  shall  see  presently ; 
in  the  meantime  it  is  worth  looking  at  some  of  the 
characteristics  of  Classicism  as  they  appear  in  the 
work  of  the  "  Classic  "  authors. 

In  the  first  place  the  "  Classic  "  writers  aimed  at 


THE   AGE   OF  GOOD   SENSE  145 

simplicity  of  style,  at  a  normal  standard  of  writing. 
They  were  intolerant  of  individual  eccentricities ; 
they  endeavoured,  and  with  success,  to  infuse  into 
English  letters  something  of  the  academic  spirit 
that  was  already  controlling  their  fellow- craftsmen 
in  France.  For  this  end  amongst  others  they  and 
the  men  of  science  founded  the  Royal  Society,  ]/ 
an  academic  committee  which  has  been  restricted 
since  to  the  physical  and  natural  sciences  and  been 
supplemented  by  similar  bodies  representing  litera- 
ture and  learning  only  in  our  own  day.  Clearness, 
plainness,  conversational  ease  and  directness  were 
the  aims  the  society  set  before  its  members  where 
their  writing  was  concerned.  "  The  Royal  Society," 
wrote  the  Bishop  of  Rochester,  its  first  historian, 
"have  exacted  from  all  their  members  a  close, 
naked,  natural  way  of  speaking ;  positive  expres- 
sions, clear  sense,  a  native  easiness,  bringing  all 
things  as  near  the  mathematical  plainness  as  they 
can;  and  preferring  the  language  of  artisans, 
countrymen,  and  merchants  before  that  of  wits 
and  scholars."  Artisans,  countrymen,  and  mer- 
chants— the  ideal  had  been  already  accepted  in 
France,  Malesherbes  striving  to  use  no  word  that 
was  not  in  the  vocabulary  of  the  day  labourers  of 
Paris,  Moliere  making  his  washerwoman  first  critic 
of  his  comedies.  It  meant  for  England  the  disuse 
of  the  turgidities  and  involutions  which  had  marked 
the  prose  of  the  preachers  and  moralists  of  the 

times  of  James  and  Charles  1. ;  scholars  and  men 

10 


146  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  letters  were  arising  who  would  have  taken  John 
Bunyan,  the  unlettered  tinker  of  Bedford,  for  their 
model  rather  than  the  learned  physician,  Sir  Thomas 
Browne. 

But  genius  like  Bunyan's  apart,  there  is  nothing 
in  the  world  more  difficult  than  to  write  with  the 
easy  and  forthright  simplicity  of  talk,  as  anyone 
may  see  who  tries  for  himself,  or  even  compares 
the  letter-writing  with  the  conversation  of  his 
friends.  So  that  this  desire  for  simplicity,  for 
clarity,  for  lucidity  led  at  once  to  a  more  deliberate 
art.  Dryden  and  Swift  and  Addison  were  assiduous 
in  their  labour  with  the  file  ;  they  excel  all  their 
predecessors  in  polish  as  much  as  the  writers  of 
the  first  Augustan  age  excelled  theirs  in  the  same 
quality.  Not  that  it  was  all  the  result  of  deliberate 
art;  in  a  way  it  was  in  the  air,  and  quite  unlearned 
people — journalists  and  pamphleteers  and  the  like 
who  wrote  unpremeditatedly  and  hurriedly  to  buy 
their  supper — partook  of  it  as  well  as  leisured 
people  and  conscious  artists.  Defoe  is  as  plain 
and  easy  and  polished  as  Swift,  yet  it  is  certain 
his  amazing  activity  and  productiveness  never 
permitted  him  to  look  back  over  a  sentence  he 
had  written.  Something  had  happened,  that  is, 
to  the  English  language.  The  assimilation  of 
latinisms  and  the  revival  of  obsolete  terms  of 
speech  had  ceased ;  it  had  become  finally  a  more 
or  less  fixed  form,  shedding  so  much  of  its  imports 
as  it  had  failed  to  make  part  of  itself  and  acquiring 


ALEXANDER  POPE. 
From  the  Portrait  by  W.  Hoare  in  the  National  Portrait  Gallerv. 


THE   AGE   OF   GOOD   SENSE  H7 

a  grammatical  and  syntactical  fixity  which  it  had 
not  possessed  in  Elizabethan  times.  When  Shakes- 
peare wrote 

"  What  cares  these  roarers  for  the  name  of  king,11 

he  was  using,  as  students  of  his  language  never 
tire  of  pointing  out  to  us,  a  perfectly  correct  local 
grammatical  form.  Fifty  years  after  that  line  was 
written,  at  the  Restoration,  local  forms  had  dropped 
out  of  written  English.  We  had  acquired  a  normal 
standard  of  language,  and  either  genius  or  labour 
was  polishing  it  for  literary  uses. 

What  they  did  for  prose  these  "  Classic  "  writers 
did  even  more  exactly — and  less  happily  —  for 
verse.  Fashions  often  become  exaggerated  before 
their  disappearance,  and  the  decadence  of  Eliza- 
bethan romanticism  had  produced  poetry  the 
wildness  and  extravagance  of  whose  images  was 
well-nigh  unbounded.  The  passion  for  intricate  j  / 
and  far-sought  metaphor  which  had  possessed 
Donne  was  accompanied  in  his  work,  and  even 
more  in  that  of  his  followers,  with  a  passion  for 
what  was  elusive  and  recondite  in  thought  and 
emotion  and  with  an  increasing  habit  of  rudeness 
and  wilful  difficultness  in  language  and  versifica- 
tion. Against  these  ultimate  licences  of  a  great 
artistic  period,  the  classical  writers  invoked  the 
qualities  of  smoothness  and  lucidity,  in  the  same 
way,  so  they  fancied,  as  Vergil  might  have  invoked 
them  against  Lucretius.  In  the  treatment  of 


H8  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

thought  and  feeling  they  wanted  clearness,  they 
wanted  ideas  which  the  mass  of  men  would  readily 
apprehend  and  assent  to,  and  they  wanted  not 
hints  or  half-spoken  suggestions  but  complete 
statement.  When  they  spoke  of  following  nature 
this  was  what  they  meant.  In  the  place  of  the 
logical  subtleties  which  Donne  and  his  school  had 
sought  in  the  scholastic  writers  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  they  brought  back  the  typically  Renaissance 
study  of  rhetoric;  the  characteristic  of  all  the 
poetry  of  the  period  is  that  it  has  a  rhetorical 
quality.  It  is  never  intimate  and  never  profound, 
but  it  has  point  and  wit,  and  it  appeals  with  con- 
fidence to  the  balanced  judgment  which  men  who 
distrust  emotion  and  have  no  patience  with  subtleties 
intellectual,  emotional,  or  merely  verbal,  have  in 
common.  Alongside  of  this  lucidity,  this  air  of 
complete  statement  in  substance,  they  strove  for 
and  achieved  smoothness  in  form.  To  the  poet 
Waller,  the  immediate  predecessor  of  Dryden,  the 
classical  writers  themselves  ascribed  the  honour  of 
the  innovation.  In  fact  Waller  was  only  carrying 
out  the  ideals  counselled  and  followed  by  Ben 
Jonson.  It  was  in  the  school  of  Waller  and 
Dryden  and  not  in  that  of  the  minor  writers  who 
called  themselves  his  followers  that  he  came  to 
his  own. 

What  then  are  the  main  differences  between 
Classicism  of  the  best  period — the  Classicism  whose 
characteristics  we  have  been  describing — and  the 


THE   AGE   OF  GOOD   SENSE  149 

Romanticism  which  came  before  and  after?  In 
the  first  place  we  must  put  the  quality  we  have 
described  as  that  of  complete  statement.  Classical 
poetry  is,  so  to  speak,  "all  there."  Its  meaning  is 
all  of  it  on  the  surface ;  it  conveys  nothing  but 
what  it  says,  and  what  it  says,  it  says  completely. 
It  is  always  vigorous  and  direct,  often  pointed  and 
aphoristic,  never  merely  suggestive,  never  given  to 
half  statement,  and  never  obscure.  You  feel  that 
as  an  instrument  of  expression  it  is  sharp  and 
polished  and  shining ;  it  is  always  bright  and 
defined  in  detail.  The  great  Romantics  go  to 
work  in  other  ways.  Their  poetry  is  a  thing  of 
half  lights  and  half-spoken  suggestions,  of  hints 
that  imagination  will  piece  together,  of  words  that 
are  charged  with  an  added  meaning  of  sound  over 
sense,  a  thing  that  stirs  the  vague  and  impalpable 
restlessness  of  memory  or  terror  or  desire  that  lies 
down  beneath  in  the  minds  of  men.  It  rouses 
what  a  philosopher  has  called  the  "  transcendental 
feeling,"  the  solemn  sense  of  the  immediate  presence 
of  "  that  which  was  and  is  and  ever  shall  be,"  to 
induce  which  is  the  property  of  the  highest  poetry. 
You  will  find  nothing  in  classical  poetry  so  poignant 
or  highly  wrought  as  Webster's 

"  Cover  her  face ;  mine  eyes  dazzle  ;  she  died  young," 
and  the  answer, 

"  I  think  not  so :  her  infelicity 
Seemed  to  have  years  too  many," 


150  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

or  so  subtle  in  its  suggestion,  the  sense  of  what  is 
said  echoing  back  to  primeval  terrors  and  despairs, 
as  this  from  Macbeth  : 

"  Stones  have  been  known  to  move  and  trees  to  speak  ; 
Augurs  and  understood  relations  have 
By  magot-pies,  and  choughs,  and  rooks  brought  forth 
The  secret'st  man  of  blood  " ; 

or  so  intoxicating  to  the  imagination  and  the  senses 
as  an  ode  of  Keats  or  a  sonnet  by  Rossetti.  But 
you  will  find  eloquent  and  pointed  statements  of 
thoughts  and  feelings  that  are  common  to  most  of 
us — the  expression  of  ordinary  human  nature— 

"  What  oft  was  thought  but  ne'er  so  well  exprest." 

"Wit  and  fine  writing "  consisting,  as  Addison 
put  it  in  a  review  of  Pope's  first  published  poem, 
not  so  much  "in  advancing  things  that  are  new, 
as  in  giving  things  that  are  known  an  agree- 
able turn." 

Though  in  this  largest  sense  the  "  Classic  "  writers 
eschewed  the  vagueness  of  Romanticism,  in  another 
and  more  restricted  way  they  cultivated  it.  They 
were  not  realists  as  all  good  Romanticists  have  to 
be.  They  had  no  love  for  oddities  or  idiosyncrasies 
•  or  exceptions.  They  loved  uniformity,  they  had  " 
no  use  for  truth  in  detail.  They  liked  the  broad, 
generalized,  descriptive  style  of  Milton,  for  instance, 
better  than  the  closely  packed  style  of  Shakespeare, 
which  gets  its  effects  from  a  series  of  minute 
observations  huddled  one  after  the  other  and  giving 


THE   AGE   OF  GOOD   SENSE  151 

the  reader,  so  to  speak,  the  materials  for  his  own 
impression,  rather  than  rendering,  as  Milton  does, 
the  expression  itself. 

Every  literary  discovery  hardens  ultimately  into 
a  convention ;  it  has  its  day  and  then  its  work  is 
done,  and  it  has  to  be  destroyed  so  that  the  ascend- 
ing spirit  of  humanity  can  find  a  better  means  of 
self-expression.  Out  of  the  writing  which  aimed 
at  simplicity  and  truth  to  nature  grew  "poetic 
diction,"  a  special  treasury  of  words  and  phrases 
deemed  suitable  for  poetry,  providing  poets  with  a 
common  stock  of  imagery,  removing  from  them 
the  necessity  of  seeing  life  and  nature  each  one  for 
himself.  The  poetry  which  Dryden  and  Pope 
wrought  out  of  their  mental  vigour,  their  followers 
wrote  to  pattern.  Poetry  became  reduced,  as  it 
had  hardly  been  before  and  has  never  been  since, 
to  a  formula.  The  Elizabethan  sonneteers,  as  we 
saw,  used  a  vocabulary  and  phraseology  in  common 
with  their  fellows  in  Italy  and  France,  and  none 
the  less  produced  fine  poetry.  But  they  used  it  to 
express  things  they  really  felt.  The  truth  is  it  is  not 
the  fact  of  a  poetic  diction  which  matters  so  much 
as  its  quality — whether  it  squares  with  sincerity, 
whether  it  is  capable  of  expressing  powerfully  and 
directly  one's  deepest  feelings.  The  history  of 
literature  can  show  poetic  dictions — special  vocabu- 
laries and  forms  for  poetry — that  have  these 
qualities;  the  diction,  for  instance,  of  the  Greek 
choruses,  or  of  the  ballad-makers,  or  of  the  Scottish 


152  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

poets  who  followed  Chaucer,  or  of  the  troubadours. 
That  of  the  classic  writers  of  an  Augustan  age  was 
not  of  such  a  kind.  Words  clothe  thought ;  poetic 
diction  had  the  artifice  of  the  crinoline :  it  would 
stand  by  itself.  The  Romantics  in  their  return  to 
nature  had  necessarily  to  abolish  it. 

But  when  all  is  said  in  criticism,  the  poetry  of 
the  earlier  half  of  the  eighteenth  century  excels 
all  other  English  poetry  in  two  respects.  Two 
qualities  belong  to  it  by  virtue  of  the  metre  in 
$  which  it  is  most  of  it  written — rapidity  and  anti- 
;  thesis.  Its  antithesis  made  it  an  incomparable 
I  vehicle  for  satire,  its  rapidity  for  narrative.  Outside 
its  limits  we  have  hardly  any  even  passable  satirical 
verse ;  within  them  there  are  half  a  dozen  works 
of  the  highest  excellence  in  this  kind.  And  if  we 
except  Chaucer,  there  is  no  one  else  in  the  whole 
range  of  English  poetry  who  has  the  narrative  gift 
so  completely  as  the  classic  poets.  Bentleys  will 
always  exist  who  will  assure  us  with  civility  that 
Pope's  Homer,  though  "  very  pretty,"  bears  little 
relation  to  the  Greek,  and  that  Dryden's  Vergil, 
though  vigorous  and  virile,  is  a  poor  representation 
of  its  original.  The  truth  remains  that  for  a  reader 
who  knows  no  ancient  languages  either  of  those 
translations  will  probably  give  a  better  idea  of  its 
original  than  any  other  rendering  in  English  that 
we  possess.  The  foundation  of  their  method  has 
been  vindicated  in  the  best  modern  translations 
from  the  Greek. 


THE   AGE   OF   GOOD   SENSE  153 

(2) 

The  term  "  eighteenth  century  "  in  the  vocabulary 
of  the  literary  historian  is  commonly  as  vaguely 
used  as  the  term  Elizabethan.  It  borrows  as  much 
as  forty  years  from  the  seventeenth  and  gives  away 
ten  to  the  nineteenth.  The  whole  of  the  work  of 
Dryden,  whom  we  must  count  as  the  first  of  the 
"  Classic  "  school,  was  accomplished  before  chrono- 
logically it  had  begun.  As  a  man  and  as  an  author 
he  was  very  intimately  related  to  his  changing 
times ;  he  adapted  himself  to  them  with  a  versa- 
tility as  remarkable  as  that  of  the  Vicar  of  Bray, 
and  hardly  less  simple-minded.  He  mourned  in 
verse  the  death  of  Cromwell  and  the  death  of  his 
successor,  successively  defended  the  theological 
positions  of  the  Church  of  England  and  the  Church 
of  Rome,  changed  his  religion  and  became  Poet 
Laureate  to  James  II.,  and  acquiesced  with  per- 
fect equanimity  in  the  Revolution  which  brought 
in  his  successor.  This  instability  of  conviction, 
though  it  gave  a  handle  to  his  opponents  in  con- 
troversy, does  not  appear  to  have  caused  any 
serious  scandal  or  disgust  among  his  contempor- 
aries, and  it  has  certainly  had  little  effect  on  the 
judgment  of  later  times.  It  has  raised  none  of 
the  reproaches  which  have  been  cast  at  the  sus- 
pected apostasy  of  Wordsworth.  Dryden  had 
little  interest  in  political  or  religious  questions; 
bis  instinct,  one  must  conceive,  was  to  conform 


154  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

to  the  prevailing  mode  and  to  trouble  himself  no 
further  about  the  matter.  Defoe  told  the  truth 
about  him  when  he  wrote  that  "  Dryden  might 
have  been  told  his  fate  that,  having  his  extraor- 
dinary genius  slung  and  pitched  upon  a  swivel, 
it  would  certainly  turn  round  as  fast  as  the  times, 
and  instruct  him  how  to  write  elegies  to  Oliver 
Cromwell  and  King  Charles  the  Second  with  all 
the  coherence  imaginable ;  how  to  write  Heligio 
Laid  and  the  Hind  and  the  Panther  and  yet  be 
the  same  man,  every  day  to  change  his  principle, 
change  his  religion,  change  his  coat,  change  his 
master,  and  yet  never  change  his  nature."  He 
never  changed  his  nature,  he  was  as  free  from 
cynicism  as  a  barrister  who  represents  successively 
opposing  parties  in  suits  or  politics ;  arid  when  he 
wrote  polemics  in  prose  or  verse  he  lent  his 
talents  as  a  barrister  lends  his  for  a  fee.  His  one 
intellectual  interest  was  in  his  art,  and  it  is  in  his 
comments  on  his  art — the  essays  and  prefaces  in 
the  composition  of  which  he  amused  the  leisure 
left  in  the  busy  life  of  a  dramatist  and  a  poet  of 
officialdom — that  his  most  charming  and  delicate 
work  is  to  be  found.  In  a  way  they  begin  modern 
English  prose;  earlier  writing  furnishes  no  equal 
to  their  colloquial  ease  and  the  grace  of  their 
expression.  And  they  contain  some  of  the  most 
acute  criticism  in  our  language — "  Classical "  in  its 
tone  (i.e.  with  a  preference  for  conformity)  but 
with  its  respect  for  order  and  tradition  always 


THE    AGE   OF   GOOD   SENSE  155 

tempered  by  good  sense  and  wit,  and  informed 
and  guided  throughout  by  a  taste  whose  catholicity 
and  sureness  was  unmatched  in  the  England  of 
his  time.  The  preface  to  his  Fables  contains 
some  excellent  notes  on  Chaucer.  They  may  be 
read  as  a  sample  of  the  breadth  and  perspicuity 
of  his  critical  perceptions. 

His  chief  poetical  works  were  most  of  them 
occasional  —  designed  either  to  celebrate  some 
remarkable  event  or  to  take  a  side  and  interpret 
a  policy  in  the  conflict,  political  or  religious,  of 
the  time.  Absalom  and  Achitophel  and  The 
Medal  were  levelled  at  the  Shaftesbury-Monmouth 
intrigues  in  the  closing  years  of  Charles  II. 
Religio  Laid  celebrated  the  excellence  of  the 
Church  of  England  in  its  character  of  via  media 
between  the  opposite  extravagances  of  Papacy  and 
Presbyterianism.  The  Hind  and  the  Panther 
found  this  perfection  spotted.  The  Church  of 
England  has  become  the  Panther,  whose  coat  is  a 
varied  pattern  of  heresy  and  truth  beside  the  spot- 
less purity  of  the  Hind,  the  Church  of  Rome. 
Astrea  Reddux  welcomed  the  returning  Charles ; 
Annus  Mirabilis  commemorated  a  year  of  fire  and 
victories.  Besides  these  he  wrote  many  dramas 
in  verse,  a  number  of  translations,  and  some 
shorter  poems,  of  which  the  odes  are  the  most 
remarkable. 

His  qualities  as  a  poet  fitted  very  exactly  the 
work  he  set  himself  to  do.  His  work  is  always 


156  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

plain  and  easily  understood ;  he  had  a  fine  faculty 
for  narration,  and  the  vigorous  rapidity  and  point 
of  his  style  enabled  him  to  sketch  a  character  or 
sum  up  a  dialectical  position  very  surely  and 
effectively.  His  writing  has  a  kind  of  spare  and 
;*  masculine  force  about  it.  It  is  this  vigour  and  the 
impression  which  he  gives  of  intellectual  strength 
and  of  a  logical  grasp  of  his  subject,  that  beyond 
question  has  kept  alive  work  which,  if  ever  poetry 
was,  was  ephemeral  in  its  origin.  The  careers  of 
the  unscrupulous  Caroline  peers  would  have  been 
closed  for  us  were  they  not  visible  in  the  reflected 
light  of  his  denunciation  of  them.  Though  Buck- 
ingham is  forgotten  and  Shaftesbury's  name 
swallowed  up  in  that  of  his  more  philanthropic 
descendant,  we  can  read  of  Achitophel  and  Zimri 
still,  and  feel  something  of  the  strength  and  heat 
which  he  caught  from  a  fiercely  fought  conflict 
and  transmitted  with  his  own  gravity  and  purpose- 
fulness  into  verse.  The  Thirty- nine  Articles  are 
not  a  proper  subject  for  poetry,  but  the  sustained 
and  serious  allegory  which  Dryden  weaves  round 
theological  discussion  preserves  his  treatment  of 
them  from  the  fate  of  the  controversialists  who 
opposed  him.  His  work  has  wit  and  vitality 
enough  to  keep  it  sweet. 

Strength  and  wit  enter  in  different  proportions 
into  the  work  of  his  successor,  Alexander  Pope— 
a  poet  whom  admirers  in  his  own  age  held  to  be 
the  greatest  in  our  language.     No  one  would  think 


THE   AGE   OF  GOOD   SENSE  157 

of  making  such  a  claim  now,  but  the  detraction 
which  he  suffered  at  the  hands  of  Wordsworth  and 
the  Romantics  ought  not  to  make  us  forget  that 
Pope,  though  not  our  greatest,  not  even  perhaps  a 
great  poet  is  incomparably  our  most  brilliant 
versifier.  Dry  den's  strength  turns  in  his  work  into 
something  more  fragile  and  delicate,  polished  with 
infinite  care  like  lacquer,  and  wrought  like  filigree 
work  to  the  last  point  of  conscious  and  perfected 
art.  He  was  not  a  great  thinker ;  the  thoughts 
which  he  embodies  in  his  philosophical  poems — 
the  Essay  on  Man  and  the  rest — are  almost  ludi- 
crously out  of  proportion  to  the  solemnity  of  the 
titles  which  introduce  them,  nor  does  he  except 
very  rarely  get  beyond  the  conceptions  common  to 
"the  average  man  when  he  attempts  introspection 
or  meditates  on  his  own  destiny.  The  reader  in 
search  of  philosophy  will  find  little  to  stimulate 
him,  and  in  the  facile  Deism  of  the  time  probably 
something  to  smile  at.  Pope  has  no  message  to 
us  now.  But  he  will  find  views  current  in  his 
time  or  borrowed  from  other  authors  put  with 
perfect  felicity  and  wit,  and  he  will  recognize  the 
justice  of  Addison's  comment  that  Pope's  wit  and 
fine  writing  consist  "not  so  much  in  advancing 
things  that  are  new,  as  in  giving  things  that  are 
known  an  agreeable  turn."  Nor  will  he  fall  into 
the  error  of  dubbing  the  author  a  minor  poet 
because  he  is  neither  subtle  nor  imaginative  nor 
profound.  A  great  poet  would  not  have  written 


158  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

like  Pope — one  must  grant  it ;  but  a  minor  poet 
could  not. 

It  is  characteristic  of  Pope's  type  of  mind  and 
kind  of  art  that  there  is  no  development  visible  in 
his  work.  Other  poets — Shakespeare,  for  instance, 
and  Keats — have  written  work  of  the  highest  quality 
when  they  were  young,  but  they  have  had  crude- 
nesses  to  shed,  things  to  get  rid  of  as  their  strength 
and  perceptions  grew.  But  Pope,  like  Minerva, 
was  full  grown  and  full  armed  from  the  beginning. 
If  we  did  not  know  that  his  Essay  on  Criticism 
was  his  first  poem  it  would  be  impossible  to  place  it 
in  the  canon  of  his  work ;  it  might  come  in  anywhere 
and  so  might  everything  else  that  he  wrote.  From 
the  beginning  his  craftsmanship  was  perfect ;  from 
the  beginning  he  took  his  subject-matter  from 
others  as  he  found  it  and  worked  it  up  into 
aphorism  and  epigram  till  each  line  shone  like  a 
cut  jewel  and  the  essential  commonplaceness  and 
poverty  of  his  material  was  obscured  by  the  glitter 
the  craftsmanship  lent  to  it.  He  was  quite  sure 
of  his  medium  from  the  beginning,  and  when  the 
opportunity  came  he  used  it  to  most  brilliant 
purpose.  The  Rape  of  the  Lock  and  the  satirical 
poems  come  later  in  his  career. 

As  a  satirist  Pope,  though  he  did  not  hit  so  hard 
as  Dryden,  struck  more  deftly  and  probed  deeper. 
He  wielded  a  rapier  where  the  other  used  a  broad- 
sword, and  though  both  used  their  weapons  with 
the  highest  skill  and  the  metaphor  must  not  be 


THE   AGE   OF  GOOD   SENSE  159 

imagined  to  impute  clumsiness  to  Dryden,  the 
rapier  made  the  cleaner  cut.  Both  employed  a 
method  in  satire  which  their  successors  (a  poor  set) 
in  England  have  not  been  intelligent  enough  to 
use.  They  allow  every  possible  good  point  to  the 
object  of  their  attack.  They  appear  to  deal  him 
an  even  and  regretful  justice.  His  good  points, 
they  put  it  in  effect,  being  so  many,  how  much 
blacker  and  more  deplorable  his  meannesses  and 
faults  !  They  do  not  do  this  out  of  charity ;  there 
was  very  little  of  the  milk  of  human  kindness  in 
Pope.  Deformity  in  his  case,  as  in  so  many  in 
fiction,  seemed  to  carry  with  it  a  certain  malevo- 
lence and  meanness  of  disposition.  The  method  is 
employed  simply  because  it  gives  the  maximum 
satirical  effect.  That  is  why  Pope's  epistle  to 
Arbuthnot,  with  its  characterization  of  Addison, 
is  the  most  damning  piece  of  invective  in  our 
language. 

The  Rape  of  the  Lock  is  an  exquisite  piece  of 
workmanship,  breathing  the  very  spirit  of  the  time. 
You  can  fancy  it  like  some  clock  made  by  one  of 
the  Louis  XIV.  craftsmen,  encrusted  with  a  heap 
of  ormulu  mock-heroics  and  impertinences  and  set 
perfectly  to  the  time  of  day.  From  no  other  poem 
could  you  gather  so  fully  and  perfectly  the  temper 
of  the  society  in  which  our  "  classic "  poetry  was 
brought  to  perfection,  its  elegant  assiduity  in 
trifles,  its  brilliant  artifice,  its  paint  and  powder 
and  patches  and  high-heeled  shoes,  its  measured 


160  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

strutting  walk  in  life  as  well  as  in  verse.  The 
Rape  of  the  Lock  is  a  mock-heroic  poem;  that  is 
to  say  it  applies  the  form  and  treatment  which  the 
"  classic "  critics  of  the  seventeenth  century  had 
laid  down  as  belonging  to  the  "  heroic  "  or  "  epic  " 
style  to  a  trifling  circumstance — the  loss  by  a 
young  lady  of  fashion  of  a  lock  of  hair.  And  it  is 
the  one  instance  in  which  this  "recipe"  for  a 
heroic  poem  which  the  French  critics  handed  on 
to  Dryden,  and  Dryden  left  to  his  descendants, 
has  been  used  well  enough  to  keep  the  work  done 
with  it  in  memory.  In  a  way  it  condemns  the 
poetical  theory  of  the  time  ;  when  forms  are  fixed, 
new  writing  is  less  likely  to  be  creative  and  more 
likely  to  exhaust  itself  in  the  ingenious  but  trifling 
exercises  of  parody  and  burlesque.  The  Rape  of 
the  Lock  is  brilliant,  but  it  is  only  play. 

The  accepted  theory  which  assumed  that  the 
forms  of  poetry  had  been  settled  in  the  past  and 
existed  to  be  applied,  though  it  concerned  itself 
mainly  with  the  ancient  writers,  included  also  two 
moderns  in  its  scope.  You  were  orthodox  if  you 
wrote  tragedy  and  epic  as  Horace  told  you  and 
satire  as  he  had  shown  you  ;  you  were  also  orthodox 
if  you  wrote  in  the  styles  of  Spenser  or  Milton. 
Spenser,  though  his  predecessors  were  counted 
barbaric  and  his  followers  tortured  and  obscure, 
never  fell  out  of  admiration ;  indeed  in  every  age 
of  English  poetry  after  him  the  greatest  poet  in  it 
is  always  to  be  found  copying  him  or  expressing 


THE   AGE   OF  GOOD   SENSE  161 

their  love  for  him — Milton  declaring  to  Dryden 
that  Spenser  was  his  "  original,"  Pope  reading  and 
praising  him,  Keats  writing  his  earliest  work  in 
close  imitation.  His  characteristic  style  and  stanza 
were  recognized  by  the  classic  school  as  a  distinct 
"  kind  "  of  poetry  w^hich  might  be  used  where  the 
theme  fitted  instead  of  the  heroic  manner,  and 
Spenserian  imitations  abound.  Sometimes  they 
are  serious ;  sometimes,  like  Shenstone's  School- 
mistress, they  are  mocking  and  another  illustration 
of  the  dangerous  ease  with  which  a  conscious  and 
sustained  effort  to  write  in  a  fixed  and  acquired 
style  runs  to  seed  in  burlesque.  Milton's  fame 
never  passed  through  the  period  of  obscurity  that 
sometimes  has  been  imagined  for  him.  He  had 
the  discerning  admiration  of  Dryden  and  others 
before  his  death.  But  to  Addison  belongs  the 
credit  of  introducing  him  to  the  writers  of  this 
time ;  his  papers  in  the  Spectator  on  Paradise 
Lost,  with  their  eulogy  of  its  author's  sublimity, 
spurred  the  interest  of  the  poets  among  his  readers. 
From  Milton  the  eighteenth  century  got  the  chief 
and  most  ponderous  part  of  its  poetic  diction,  high- 
sounding  periphrases  and  borrowings  from  Latin 
used  without  the  gravity  and  sincerity  and  fullness 
of  thought  of  the  master  who  brought  them  in. 
When  they  wrote  blank  verse,  the  classic  poets 
wrote  it  in  the  Milton  manner. 

The  use  of  these  two  styles  may  be  studied  in 

the  writings  of  one  man,  James   Thomson.     For 

11 


162  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

besides  acquiring  a  kind  of  anonymous  immortality 
with  patriots  as  the  author  of  "  Rule,  Britannia," 
Thomson  wrote  two  poems  respectively  in  the 
Spenserian  and  the  Miltonic  manner,  the  former 
The  Castle  of  Indolence,  the  latter  The  Seasons. 
The  Spenserian  manner  is  caught  very  effectively, 
but  the  adoption  of  the  style  of  Paradise  Lost, 
with  its  allusiveness,  circumlocution  and  weight, 
removes  any  freshness  the  Seasons  might  have  had, 
had  the  circumstances  in  them  been  put  down  as 
they  were  observed.  As  it  is,  hardly  anything  is 
directly  named ;  birds  are  always  the  "  feathered 
tribe"  and  everything  else  has  a  similar  polite 
generality  for  its  title.  Thomson  was  a  simple- 
minded  man,  with  a  faculty  for  watching  and 
enjoying  nature  which  belonged  to  few  in  his 
sophisticated  age ;  it  is  unfortunate  he  should  have 
spent  his  working  hours  in  rendering  the  fruit  of 
country  rambles  freshly  observed  into  a  cold  and 
stilted  diction.  It  suited  the  eighteenth-century 
reader  well,  for  not  understanding  nature  herself, 
he  was  naturally  obliged  to  read  her  in  translations. 

(3) 

The  chief  merits  of  "  Classic  "  poetry — its  clear- 
ness, its  vigour,  its  direct  statement — are  such  as 
belong  theoretically  rather  to  prose  than  to  poetry. 
In  fact,  it  was  in  prose  that  the  most  vigorous 
intellect  of  the  time  found  itself.  We  have  seen 
how  Dryden,  reversing  the  habit  of  other  poets, 


THE   AGE   OF  GOOD   SENSE  163 

succeeded  in  expressing  his  personality  not  in 
poetry,  which  was  his  vocation,  but  in  prose,  which 
was  the  amusement  of  his  leisure  hours.  Spenser 
had  put  his  politics  into  prose  and  his  ideals  into 
verse  ;  Dryden  wrote  his  politics — to  order — in 
verse,  and  in  prose  set  down  the  thoughts  and 
fancies  which  were  the  deepest  part  of  him  because 
they  were  about  his  art.  The  metaphor  of  parent- 
age, though  honoured  by  use,  does  not  always  fit 
literary  history  well  ;  none  the  less,  the  tradition 
which  describes  him  as  the  father  of  modern  English 
prose  is  very  near  the  truth.  He  puts  into  practice 
for  the  first  time  the  ideals,  described  in  the  first 
chapter  of  this  book,  which  were  set  up  by  the 
scholars  who  let  into  English  the  light  of  the 
Renaissance.  With  the  exception  of  the  dialogue 
on  Dramatic  Poesy,  his  work  is  almost  all  of  it 
occasional,  the  fruit  of  the  mood  of  a  moment,  and 
written  rather  in  the  form  of  a  causerie,  a  kind  of 
informal  talk,  than  of  a  considered  essay.  And  it 
is  all  couched  in  clear,  flowing,  rather  loosely 
jointed  English,  carefully  avoiding  rhetoric  and 
eloquence  and  striving  always  to  reproduce  the 
ease  and  flow  of  cultured  conversation,  rather  than 
the  tighter,  more  closely  knit  style  of  consciously 
"  literary  "  prose.  His  methods  were  the  methods 
of  the  four  great  prose-writers  who  followed  him — ;i 
Defoe,  Addison,  Steele,  and  Swift. 

Of  these,  Defoe  was  the  eldest  and  in  some  ways 
the   most   remarkable.     He   has   been  called   the 


164  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

earliest  professional  author  in  our  language,  and 
if  that  is  not  strictly  true,  he  is  at  any  rate  the 
earliest  literary  journalist.  His  output  of  work 
was  enormous  ;  he  wrote  on  any  and  every  subject; 
there  was  no  event,  whether  in  politics  or  letters  or 
discovery,  but  he  was  ready  with  something  pat 
on  it  before  the  public  interest  faded.  It  followed 
that  a  time  when  imprisonment,  mutilation,  and 
the  pillory  took  the  place  of  our  modern  libel 
actions  he  had  an  adventurous  career.  In  politics 
he  followed  the  Whig  cause  and  served  the  Govern- 
ment with  his  pen,  notably  by  his  writings  in 
support  of  the  union  with  Scotland,  in  which  he 
won  over  the  Scots  by  his  description  of  the  com- 
mercial advantage  which  would  follow  the  abolition 
of  the  border.  This  line  of  argument,  taken  at  a 
time  when  the  governing  of  political  tendencies  by 
commercial  interests  was  by  no  means  the  accepted 
commonplace  it  is  now,  proves  him  a  man  of  an 
active  and  original  mind.  His  originality,  indeed, 
sometimes  overreached  the  comprehension  both 
of  the  public  and  his  superiors ;  he  was  imprisoned 
for  an  attack  on  the  Hanoverian  succession  which 
was  intended  ironically ;  apparently  he  was  ignorant 
of  what  every  journalist  ought  to  know,  that 
irony  is  at  once  the  most  dangerous  and  the  least 
effectual  weapon  in  the  whole  armoury  of  the 
press.  The  fertility  and  ingenuity  of  his  intellect 
may  be  best  gauged  by  the  number  of  modern 
enterprises  and  contrivances  that  are  foreshadowed 


THE   AGE   OF  GOOD   SENSE  165 

in  his  work.  Here  are  a  few,  all  utterly  unknown 
in  his  own  day,  collected  by  a  student  of  his  works: 
a  Board  of  Trade  register  for  seamen  ;  factories 
for  goods ;  agricultural  credit  banks ;  a  commis- 
sion of  enquiry  into  bankruptcy ;  and  a  system 
of  national  poor  relief.  They  show  him  to  have 
been  an  independent  and  courageous  thinker  where 
social  questions  were  concerned. 

He  was  nearly  sixty  before  he  had  published  his 
first  novel,  Robinson  Crusoe,  the  book  by  which 
he  is  universally  known,  and  on  which  with  the 
seven  other  novels  which  followed  it  the  best  part 
of  his  literary  fame  rests.  But  his  earlier  works — 
they  are  reputed  to  number  over  two  hundred — 
possess  no  less  remarkable  literary  qualities.  It  is 
not  too  much  to  say  that  all  the  gifts  which  are 
habitually  recommended  for  cultivation  by  those 
who  aspire  to  journalistic  success  are  to  be  found 
in  his  prose.  He  has  in  the  first  place  the  gift  of  .4, 
perfect  lucidity  no  matter  how  complicated  the 
subject  he  is  expounding ;  such  a  book  as  his " 
Complete  English  Tradesman  is  full  of  passages  in 
which  a  complex  and  difficult  subject-matter  is  set 
forth  so  plainly  and  clearly  that  the  least  literate 
of  his  readers  could  have  no  doubt  of  his  under- 
standing it.  He  has  also  an  amazingly  exact 
acquaintance  with  the  technicalities  of  all  kinds  of 
trades  and  professions;  none  of  our  writers,  not 
even  Shakespeare,  shows  half  such  a  knowledge  of 
the  circumstances  of  life  among  different  r^nks  and 


166  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

conditions  of  men  ;  none  of  them  has  realized  with 
such  fidelity  how  so  many  different  persons  lived 
and  moved.  His  gift  of  narrative  and  description  is 
masterly,  as  readers  of  his  novels  know  (we  shall 
have  to  come  back  to  it  in  discussing  the  growth 
of  the  English  novel) ;  several  of  his  works  show 
him  to  have  been  endowed  with  a  fine  faculty 
of  psychological  observation.  Without  the  least 
consciousness  of  the  value  of  what  he  was  writing, 
nor  indeed  with  any  deliberate  artistic  intention, 
he  made  himself  one  of  the  masters  of  English 
prose. 

Defoe  had  been  the  champion  of  the  Whigs  ;  on 
the  Tory  side  the  ablest  pen  was  that  of  Jonathan 
Swift.  His  works  proclaim  him  to  have  had  an 
intellect  less  wide  in  its  range  than  that  of  his 
antagonist,  but  more  vigorous  and  powerful.  He 
wrote,  too,  more  carefully.  In  his  youth  he  had 
been  private  secretary  to  Sir  William  Temple,  a 
writer  now  as  good  as  forgotten  because  of  the 
triviality  of  his  matter,  but  in  his  day  esteemed 
because  of  the  easy  urbanity  and  polish  of  his 
prose.  From  him  Swift  learned  the  labour  of  the 
file,  and  he  declared  in  later  life  that  it  was 
"  generally  believed  that  this  author  has  advanced 
our  English  tongue  to  as  great  a  perfection  as  it, 
can  well  bear."  In  fact,  he  added  to  the  ease  and 
cadences  he  had  learned  from  Temple  qualities  of 
vigour  and  directness  of  his  own  which  put  his 
work  far  above  his  master's.  And  he  dealt  with 


JONATHAN   SWIFT. 
Front  a  painting  by  C.  Jervas  in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery. 


THE   AGE   OF   GOOD   SENSE  167 

more  important  subject-matter  than  the  academic 
exercises  on  which  Temple  exercised  his  fastidious 
and  meticulous  powers  of  revision. 

In  temperament  he  is  opposed  to  all  the  writers 
of  his  time.  There  is  no  doubt  but  there  was 
some  radical  disorder  in  his  system ;  brain  disease 
clouded  his  intellect  in  his  old  age,  and  his  last 
years  were  death  in  life ;  right  through  his  life  he 
was  a  savagely  irritable,  sardonic,  dark  and  violent 
man,  impatient  of  the  slightest  contradiction  or 
thwarting,  and  given  to  explosive  and  instantaneous 
rage.  He  delighted  in  flouting  convention,  gloried 
in  outraging  decency.  The  rage,  which,  as  he  said 
himself,  tore  his  heart  out,  carried  him  to  strange 
excesses.  There  is  something  ironical  (he  would 
himself  have  appreciated  it)  in  the  popularity  of 
Grullivers  Travels  as  a  children's  book — "that 
ascending  wave  of  savagery  and  satire  which  over- 
whelms policy  and  learning  to  break  against  the 
ultimate  citadel  of  humanity  itself."  In  none  of 
his  contemporaries  (except  perhaps  in  the  senti- 
mentalities of  Steele)  can  one  detect  the  traces  of 
emotion  ;  to  read  Swift  is  to  be  conscious  of  intense 
feeling  on  almost  every  page.  The  surface  of  his 
style  may  be  smooth  and  equable,  but  the  central 
fires  of  passion  are  never  far  beneath,  and  through 
cracks  and  fissures  come  intermittent  bursts  of 
flame.  Defoe's  irony  is  so  measured  and  studiously 
commonplace  that  perhaps  those  who  imprisoned 
him  because  they  believed  him  to  be  serious  are 


168  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

hardly  to  be  blamed ;  Swift's  quivers  and  reddens 
with  anger  in  every  line. 

But  his  pen  seldom  slips  from  the  strong  grasp 
of  his  controlling  art.  The  extraordinary  skill  and 
closeness  of  his  allegorical  writings — unmatched  in 
their  kind — is  witness  to  the  care  and  sustained 
labour  which  went  to  their  making.  He  is  content 
with  no  general  correspondences  ;  his  allegory  does 
not  fade  away  into  a  story  in  which  only  the  main 
characters  have  a  secondary  significance ;  the 
minutest  circumstances  have  a  bearing  in  the  satire 
and  the  moral.  In  The  Tale  of  a  Tub  and  in 
Gulliver's  Travels — particularly  in  the  former— 
the  multitude  as  well  as  the  aptness  of  the  parallels 
between  the  imaginary  narrative  and  the  facts  it  is 
meant  to  represent  is  unrivalled  in  works  of  the 
kind.  Only  the  highest  mental  powers,  working 
with  intense  fervour  and  concentration,  could  have 
achieved  the  sustained  brilliancy  of  the  result. 
"  What  a  genius  I  had  when  I  wrote  that  book  !  " 
Swift  is  said  to  have  exclaimed  in  his  old  age  when 
he  re-read  The  Tale  of  a  Tub,  and  certainly  the 
book  is  a  marvel  of  constructive  skill,  all  the  more 
striking  because  it  makes  allegory  out  of  history 
and  consequently  is  denied  that  freedom  of  narrative 
so  brilliantly  employed  in  the  Travels. 

Informing  all  his  writings  too,  besides  intense 
feeling  and  an  omnipresent  and  controlling  art, 
is  strong  common  sense.  His  aphorisms,  both 
those  collected  under  the  heading  of  Thoughts  on 


THE   AGE   OF  GOOD   SENSE  169 

Various  Subjects,  and  countless  others  scattered  up 
and  down  his  pages,  are  a  treasury  of  sound,  if  a 
little  sardonic,  practical  wisdom.  His  most  insistent 
prejudices  foreshadow  in  their  essential  sanity  and 
justness  those  of  that  great  master  of  life,  Dr 
Johnson.  He  could  not  endure  over-politeness,  a 
-^ice  which  must  have  been  very  oppressive  in 
society  of  his  day.  He  savagely  resented  and  con- 
demned a  display  of  affection — particularly  marital 
affection — in  public.  In  an  age  when  it  was  the 
normal  social  system  of  settling  quarrels,  he  con- 
demned duelling;  and  he  said  some  very  wise  things 
—things  that  might  still  be  said — on  the  problem  of 
education.  In  economics  he  was  as  right-hearted 
as  Ruskin  and  as  wrong-headed.  Carlyle,  who  was 
in  so  many  respects  an  echo  of  him,  found  in  a 
passage  in  his  works  a  "  dim  anticipation "  of  his 
philosophy  of  clothes. 

The  leading  literary  invention  of  the  period — 
after  that  of  the  heroic  couplet  for  verse — was  the 
prose,  periodical  essay.  Defoe,  it  is  hardly  necessary 
to  say,  began  it ;  it  was  his  nature  to  be  first  with 
any  new  thing :  but  its  establishment  as  a  prevailing 
literary  mode  is  due  to  two  authors,  Joseph  Addison 
and  Richard  Steele.  Of  the  two  famous  series— 
the  Tatler  and  the  Spectator — for  which  they  were 
both  responsible,  Steele  must  take  the  first  credit ; 
he  began  them,  and  though  Addison  came  in  and 
by  the  deftness  and  lightness  of  his  writing  took  the 
lion's  share  of  their  popularity,  both  the  plan  and 


170  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

the  characters  round  whom  the  bulk  of  the  essays 
in  the  Spectator  came  to  revolve  was  the  creation 
of  his  collaborator.  Steele  we  know  very  intimately 
from  his  own  writings  and  from  Thackeray's 
portrait  of  him.  He  was  an  emotional,  full-blooded 
kind  of  man,  reckless  and  dissipated  but  funda- 
mentally honest  and  good-hearted — a  type  very 
common  in  his  day  as  the  novels  show,  but  not 
otherwise  to  be  found  in  the  ranks  of  its  writers. 
What  there  is  of  pathos  and  sentiment,  and  most 
of  what  there  is  of  humour  in  the  Taller  and  the 
Spectator,  are  his.  And  he  created  the  dramatis 
personce  out  of  whose  adventures  the  slender  thread 
of  continuity  which  binds  the  essays  together  is 
woven.  Addison,  though  less  open  to  the  on- 
slaughts of  the  conventional  moralist,  was  a  less 
lovable  personality.  Constitutionally  endowed 
with  little  vitality,  he  suffered  mentally  as  well  as 
bodily  from  languor  and  lassitude.  His  lack  of 
enthusiasm,  his  cold-blooded  formalism,  caused 
comment  even  in  an  age  which  prided  itself  in  self- 
command  and  decorum. 

His  occasional  malevolence  (if  the  word  be  not 
too  strong)  proceeded  from  a  flaccidity  which 
seemed  to  envy  the  activities  and  enthusiasms  of 
other  men.  As  a  writer  he  was  superficial ;  he  had 
not  the  energy  necessary  for  forming  a  clear  or 
profound  judgment  on  any  question  of  difficulty ; 
Johnson's  comment,  "  He  thinks  justly  but  he 
thinks  faintly,"  sums  up  the  truth  about  him.  His 


THE   AGE   OF  GOOD   SENSE  171 

good  qualities  were  of  a  slighter  kind  than  Swift's  ; 
he  was  a  quiet  and  accurate  observer  of  manners 
and  fashions  in  life  and  conversation,  and  he  had 
the  gift  of  a  style — what  Johnson  calls  "The 
Middle  Style  " — very  exactly  suited  to  the  kind  of 
work  on  which  he  was  habitually  engaged,  "  always 
equable,  always  easy,  without  glowing  words  or 
pointed  sentences,"  but  polished,  lucid,  and  urbane. 
Steele  and  Addison  were  conscious  moralists  as 

>. 

well  as  literary  men.  They  desired  to  purge  society 
of  the  Restoration  licence  ;  to  their  efforts  we  must 
credit  the  alteration  in  morality  which  The  School 
for  Scandal  shows  over  The  Way  of  the  World. 
Their  professed  object,  as  they  stated  themselves, 
was  "to  banish  vice  and  ignorance  out  of  the 
territories  of  Great  Britain  "  (nothing  less!)  "and  to 
bring  philosophy  out  of  closets  and  libraries,  schools 
and  colleges,  to  dwell  in  clubs  and  assemblies,  at 
tea-tables  and  coffee-houses."  In  fact,  their  satires 
were  politically  nearer  home,  and  the  chief  objects 
of  their  aversion  were  the  Tory  squires  whom  it  \  / 
was  their  business  as  Whigs  to  deride.  On  the 
Coverley  papers  in  the  Spectator  rests  the  chief  part 
of  their  literary  fame ;  these  belong  rather  to  the 
special  history  of  the  novel  than  to  that  of  the 
periodical  essay. 


CHAPTER  VI 

DR   JOHNSON   AND    HIS   TIME 

BY  1730  the  authors  whose  work  made  the  "  classic  " 
school  in  England  were  dead  or  had  ceased  writing ; 
by  the  same  date  Samuel  Johnson  had  begun  his 
career  as  a  man  of  letters.  The  difference  between 
the  period  of  his  maturity  and  the  period  we  have 
been  examining  is  not  perhaps  easy  to  define ;  but 
it  exists  and  it  can  be  felt  unmistakably  in  reading. 
For  one  thing,  "Classicism  "  had  become  completely 
naturalized ;  it  had  ceased  to  regard  the  French 
as  arbiters  of  elegance  and  literary  taste;  indeed 
Johnson  himself  never  spoke  of  them  without 
disdain,  and  hated  them  as  much  as  he  hated 
Scotsmen.  Writing,  like  dress  and  the  common 
way  of  life,  became  plainer  and  graver  and  thought 
stronger  and  deeper.  In  manners  and  speech 
something  of  the  brutalism  which  was  at  the  root 
of  the  English  character  at  the  time  began  to 
colour  the  refinement  of  the  preceding  age.  Dilet- 
tantism gave  way  to  learning  and  speculation  ;  in 
the  place  of  Bolingbroke  came  Adam  Smith;  in 
the  place  of  Addison,  Johnson.  In  a  way,  it  is  the 
solidest  and  sanest  time  in  English  letters.  Yet  in 

172 


DR  JOHNSON   AND   HIS  TIME  173 

the  midst  of  its  urbanity  and  order  forces  were 
gathering  for  its  destruction.  The  ballad-mongers 
were  busy ;  Johnson  was  scarcely  dead  before 
Blake  was  drawing  and  rhyming  and  Burns  was 
giving  songs  and  lays  to  his  country-side.  In  the 
distance — Johnson  could  not  hear  them — sounded, 
like  the  horns  of  elf-land  faintly  blowing,  the 
trumpet-calls  of  romance. 

If  the  whole  story  of  Dr  Johnson's  life  were  the 
story  of  his  published  books  it  would  be  very 
difficult  to  understand  his  pre-eminent  and  symbolic 
position  in  literary  history.  His  best-known  work 
—it  still  remains  so — was  his  dictionary,  and 
dictionaries,  for  all  the  licence  they  give  and 
Johnson  took  for  the  expression  of  a  personality, 
are  the  business  of  purely  mechanical  talents.  A 
lesser  man  than  he  might  have  cheated  us  of  such 
delights  as  the  definitions  of  "oats,"  or  "net,"  or 
"  pension,"  but  his  book  would  certainly  have  been 
no  worse  as  a  book.  Yet  the  dictionary  has  an 
importance  of  its  own  in  the  history  of  our  litera- 
ture, for  it  was  the  first  systematic  attempt  to  do 
for  the  English  tongue  what  the  labours  of  the 
academy  did  for  French,  and  it  is  the  foundation 
on  which  succeeding  edifices  of  research  have  been 
built.  Johnson's  other  works  were  miscellaneous 
in  character.  He  tried  as  many  forms  of  writing  as 
a  modern  dilettante,  though  nothing  was  more  alien 
to  his  character  than  mere  dilettantism.  Poetry, 
plays,  journalism,  the  novel,  biography,  travel, 


174  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

letters,  all  gained  something  from  his  hand,  though 
nothing  remarkable.  In  his  early  years  he  wrote 
two  satires  in  verse  in  imitation  of  Juvenal ;  they 
were  followed  later  by  two  series  of  periodical 
essays  on  the  model  of  the  Spectator ;  neither  of 
them — the  Rambler  nor  the  Idler — were  at  all 
successful.  Rasselas,  a  tale  with  a  purpose,  is 
melancholy  reading ;  the  Journey  to  the  Western 
Hebrides  has  been  utterly  eclipsed  by  Boswell's 
livelier  and  more  human  chronicle  of  the  same 
events.  The  Lives  of  the  Poets,  his  greatest  work, 
was  composed  with  pain  and  difficulty  when  he 
was  seventy  years  old ;  even  it  is  but  a  quarry 
from  which  a  reader  may  dig  the  ore  of  a  sound 
critical  judgment  summing  up  a  life's  reflection, 
out  of  the  grit  and  dust  of  perfunctory  biographical 
compilations.  There  was  hardly  one  of  the  literary 
coterie  over  which  he  presided  that  was  not  doing 
better  and  more  lasting  work.  Nothing  that 
Johnson  wrote  is  to  be  compared,  for  excellence  in 
its  own  manner,  with  Tom  Jones  or  the  Vicar  of 
Wakefield  or  the  Citizen  of  the  World.  He  pro- 
duced nothing  in  writing  approaching  the  magni- 
tude of  Gibbon's  Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Roman 
Empire,  or  the  profundity  of  Burke's  philosophy  of 
politics.  Even  Sir  Joshua  Reynolds,  whose  main 
business  was  painting  and  not  the  pen,  was  almost 
as  good  an  author  as  he ;  his  Discourses  have  little 
to  fear  when  they  are  set  beside  Johnson's  essays. 
Yet  all  these  men  recognized  him  as  their  guide 


DR  JOHNSON   AND   HIS   TIME  175 

and  leader;  the  spontaneous  selection  of  such  a 
democratic  assembly  as  men  of  genius  in  a  tavern 
fixed  upon  him  as  chairman,  and  we  in  these  later 
days,  who  are  safe  from  the  overpowering  force  of 
personality  and  presence — or  at  least  can  only 
know  of  it  reflected  in  books — instinctively  recog- 
nize him  as  the  greatest  man  of  his  age.  What 
is  the  reason  ? 

Johnson's  pre-eminence  is  the  pre-eminence  of 
character.  He  was  a  great  moralist ;  he  summed 
up  in  himself  the  tendencies  of  thought  and  litera- 
ture of  his  time  and  excelled  all  others  in  his  grasp 
of  them ;  and  he  was  perhaps  more  completely 
than  anyone  else  in  the  whole  history  of  English 
literature,  the  typical  Englishman.  He  was  one 
of  those  to  whom  is  applicable  the  commonplace 
that  he  was  greater  than  his  books.  It  is  the 
fashion  nowadays  among  some  critics  to  speak  of 
his  biographer  Boswell  as  if  he  were  a  novelist  or  a 
playwright  and  to  classify  the  Johnson  we  know 
with  Hamlet  and  Don  Quixote  as  the  product  of 
creative  or  imaginative  art,  working  on  a  "lost 
original."  No  exercise  of  critical  ingenuity  could 
be  more  futile  or  impertinent.  The  impression  of 
the  solidity  and  magnitude  of  Johnson's  character 
which  is  to  be  gathered  from  Boswell  is  enforced 
from  other  sources;  from  his  essays  and  his  prayers 
and  meditations,  from  the  half-dozen  or  so  lives 
and  reminiscences  which  were  published  in  the 
years  following  his  death  (their  very  number 


176  EN7GLISH   LITERATURE 

establishing  the  reverence  with  which  he  was 
regarded),  from  the  homage  of  other  men  whose 
genius  their  books  leave  indisputable.  Indeed,  the 
Johnson  we  know  from  Boswell,  though  it  is  the 
^broadest  and  most  masterly  portrait  in  the  whole 
range  of  biography,  gives  less  than  the  whole 
magnitude  of  the  man.  When  Boswell  first  met 
him  at  the  age  of  twenty-two,  Johnson  was  fifty- 
four.  His  long  period  of  poverty  and  struggle  was 
past.  His  Dictionary  and  all  his  works  except 
the  Lives  of  the  Poets  were  behind  him ;  a  pension 
from  the  Crown  had  established  him  in  security 
for  his  remaining  years ;  his  position  was  univer- 
sally acknowledged.  So  that  though  the  portrait 
in  the  Life  is  a  full-length  study  of  Johnson  the 
conversationalist  and  literary  dictator,  the  propor- 
tion it  preserves  is  faulty,  and  its  study  of  the  early 
years — the  years  of  poverty,  of  the  Vanity  of 
Human  Wishes  and  London,  of  Rasselas,  which  he 
wrote  to  pay  the  expenses  of  his  mother's  funeral — 
is  slight. 

It  was,  however,  out  of  the  bitterness  and 
struggle  of  these  early  years  that  the  strength  and 
sincerity  of  character  which  carried  Johnson  surely 
and  tranquilly  through  the  time  of  his  triumph 
were  derived.  From  the  beginning  he  made  no 
compromise  with  the  world  and  no  concession  to 
fashion.  The  world  had  to  take  him  at  his  own 
valuation  or  not  at  all.  He  never  deviated  one 
hair's-breadth  from  the  way  he  had  chosen. 


DR  SAMUEL  JOHNSON. 
From  a  painting  by  John  Opie  in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery. 


DR  JOHNSON  AND  HIS  TIME  177 

I  Judged  by  the  standards  of  journalistic  success, 
I  the  Rambler  could  not  well  be  worse  than  he  made 
I  it.  Compared  with  the  lightness  and  gaiety  and 
I  the  mere  lip-service  to  morality  of  Addison,  its 
I  edification  is  ponderous.  Both  authors  state  the 
commonplaces  of  conduct,  but  Addison  achieves 
lightness  in  the  doing  of  it,  and  his  manner,  by 
means  of  which  platitudes  are  stated  lightly  and 
pointedly  and  with  an  air  of  novelty,  is  the  classic 
manner  of  journalism.  Johnson  goes  heavily  and 
directly  to  the  point,  handling  well-worn  moral 
themes  in  general  and  dogmatic  language  without 
any  attempt  to  enliven  them  with  an  air  of  dis- 
covery or  surprise.  Yet  they  were,  in  a  sense, 
discoveries  to  him  ;  not  one  of  them  but  was  deeply 
and  sincerely  felt ;  not  one  but  is  not  a  direct  and 
to  us  a  pathetically  dispassionate  statement  of  the 
reflection  of  thirty  years  of  grinding  poverty  and  a 
soul's  anguish.  Viewed  in  the  light  of  his  life,  the 
Rambler  is  one  of  the  most  moving  of  books.  If 
its  literary  value  is  slight,  it  is  a  document  in 
character. 

So  that  when  he  came  to  his  own,  when  gradually 
the  public  whom  he  despised  and  neglected  raised 
him  into  a  pontifical  position  matched  by  none 
before  him  in  England  and  none  since  save  Carlyle, 
he  was  sure  of  himself;  success  did  not  spoil  him. 
His  judgment  was  un warped  by  flattery.  The 
almost  passionate  tenderness  and  humanity  which 

lay  beneath  his  gruffness  was  undimmed.     His  per- 

12 


178  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

sonality  triumphed  in  all  the  fullness  and  richness 
which  had  carried  it  in  integrity  through  his  years 
of  struggle.  For  over  twenty  years  from  his  chair 
in  taverns  in  the  Strand  and  Fleet  Street  he  ruled 
literary  London,  imposed  his  critical  principles  on 
the  great  body  of  English  letters,  and  by  his  talk 
and  his  friendships  became  the  embodiment  of  the 
literary  temperament  of  his  age. 

His  talk  as  it  is  set  down  by  Boswell  is  his  best 
monument.  It  was  the  happiest  possible  fate  that 
threw  those  two  men  together,  for  Boswell,  besides 
being  an  admirer  and  reporter  sedulously  chroni- 
cling all  his  master  said  and  did,  fortunately  in- 
fluenced both  the  saying  and  the  doing.  Most  of 
us  have  someone  in  whose  company  we  best  shine, 
who  puts  our  wits  on  their  mettle  and  spurs  us  to 
our  greatest  readiness  and  vivacity.  Boswell,  for 
all  his  assumed  humility  and  for  all  Johnson's 
affected  disdain,  was  just  such  a  companion  for 
Johnson.  Johnson  was  at  his  best  when  Boswell 
was  present.  Boswell  not  only  drew  Johnson  out 
on  subjects  in  which  his  robust  common  sense  and 
readiness  of  judgment  were  fitted  to  shine,  but 
he  was  at  pains  to  lure  him  into  situations  in  which 
he  might  display  himself  to  advantage.  It  was  the 
biographer  who  suggested  and  conducted  that  tour 
in  Scotland  which  gave  Johnson  an  opportunity  for 
displaying  himself  at  his  best.  The  recorded  talk 
is  extraordinarily  varied  and  entertaining.  It  is  a 
mistake  to  conceive  Johnson  as  a  monster  of  bear- 


DR  JOHNSON   AND   HIS  TIME  179 

like  rudeness,  shouting  down  opposition,  hectoring 
his  companions,  and  habitually  a  blustering  verbal 
bully.  We  are  too  easily  hypnotized  by  Macaulay's 
impression,  and  that  is  too  near  caricature.  He 
could  be  merciless  in  argument  and  often  wrong- 
headed,  and  he  was  always  acute,  uncomfortably 
acute,  in  his  perception  of  a  fallacy,  and  a  little 
disconcerting  in  his  unmasking  of  pretence.  But 
he  could  be  gay  and  tender  too,  and  in  his  heart  he 
was  a  shrinking  and  sensitive  man. 

As  a  critic  (his  criticism  is  the  only  side  of  his 
literary  work  that  need  be  considered),  Johnson 
must  be  allowed  a  high  place.  His  natural  indo- 
lence in  production  had  prevented  him  from  ex- 
hausting his  faculties  in  the  more  exacting  labours 
of  creative  work,  and  it  had  left  him  time  for 
omnivorous  if  desultory  reading,  the  fruits  of 
which  he  stored  in  a  wonderfully  retentive  memory 
against  an  occasion  for  their  use.  To  a  very  fully 
equipped  mind  he  brought  the  service  of  a  robust 
and  acute  judgment.  Moreover,  when  he  applied 
his  mind  to  a  subject  he  had  a  faculty  of  intense, 
if  fitful  concentration ;  he  could  seize  with  great 
force  on  the  heart  of  a  matter ;  he  had  the  power 
in  a  wonderfully  short  time  of  extracting  the  kernel 
and  leaving  the  husk.  His  judgments  in  writing 
are  like  those  recorded  by  Boswell  from  his  con- 
versation ;  that  is  to  say,  he  does  not,  as  a  critic 
whose  medium  was  normally  the  pen  rather  than 
the  tongue  would  tend  to  do,  search  for  fine  shades 


180  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  distinction,  subdivide  subtleties,  or  be  careful 
to  admit  caveats  or  exceptions ;  he  passes,  on  the 
contrary,  rapid  and  forcible  verdicts,  not  seldom  in 
their  assertions  untenably  sweeping,  and  always 
decided  and  dogmatic.  He  never  affects  diffidence 
or  defers  to  the  judgments  of  others.  His  power 
of  concentration,  of  seizing  on  essentials,  has  given 
us  his  best  critical  work — nothing  could  be  better, 
for  instance,  than  his  characterization  of  the  poets 
whom  he  calls  the  metaphysical  school  (Donne, 
Crashaw,  and  the  rest),  which  is  the  most  valuable 
part  of  his  life  of  Cowley.  Even  where  he  is  most 
prejudiced — for  instance  in  his  attack  on  Milton's 
Lycidas — there  is  usually  something  to  be  said  for 
his  point  of  view.  And  after  this  concentration, 
his  excellence  depends  on  his  basic  common  sense. 
His  classicism  is  always  tempered,  like  Dryden's, 
by  a  humane  and  sensible  dislike  of  pedantry ;  he 
sets  no  store  by  the  unities ;  in  his  preface  to 
Shakespeare  he  allows  more  than  a  "  classic  "  could 
have  been  expected  to  admit,  writing  in  it,  in 
truth,  some  of  the  manliest  and  wisest  things  in 
Shakespearean  literature.  Of  course,  he  had  his 
failings — the  greatest  of  them  what  Lamb  called 
imperfect  sympathy.  He  could  see  no  good  in 
republicans  or  agnostics,  and  none  in  Scotland  or 
France.  Not  that  the  phrase  "imperfect  sym- 
pathy," which  expresses  by  implication  the  romantic 
critic's  point  of  view,  would  have  appealed  to  him. 
When  Dr  Johnson  did  not  like  people,  the  fault 


DR  JOHNSON   AND   HIS  TIME  181 

was  in  them,  not  in  him;  a  ruthless  objectivity 
is  part  of  the  classic  equipment.  He  failed,  too, 
because  he  could  neither  understand  nor  appreciate 
poetry  which  concerned  itself  with  the  sensations 
that  come  from  external  nature.  Nature  was  to 
him  a  closed  book,  very  likely  for  a  purely  physical 
reason.  He  was  short-sighted  to  the  point  of 
myopia,  and  a  landscape  meant  nothing  to  him ; 
when  he  tried  to  describe  one,  as  he  did  in  the 
chapter  on  the  "  happy  valley "  in  Rasselas,  he 
failed.  What  he  did  not  see  he  could  not  appre- 
ciate ;  perhaps  it  is  too  much  to  ask  of  his  self- 
contained  and  unbending  intellect  that  he  should 
appreciate  the  report  of  it  by  other  men. 

(2) 

As  we  have  seen,  Johnson  was  not  only  great 
in  himself,  he  was  great  in  his  friends.  Round 
him,  meeting  him  as  an  equal,  gathered  the  greatest 
and  most  prolific  writers  of  the  time.  There  is 
no  better  way  to  study  the  central  and  accepted 
men  of  letters  of  the  period  than  to  take  some 
full  evening  at  the  club  from  Boswell,  read  a 
page  or  two,  watch  what  the  talkers  said,  and 
then  trace  each  back  to  his  own  works  for  a  com- 
plete picture  of  his  personality.  The  lie  of  the 
literary  landscape  in  this  wonderful  time  will 
become  apparent  to  you  as  you  read.  You  will 
find  Johnson  enthroned,  Boswell  at  his  ear,  round 
him  men  like  Reynolds  and  Burke,  Richardson 


182  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

and  Fielding  and  Goldsmith,  Robertson  and  Gib- 
bon, and  occasionally  drawn  to  the  circle  minnows 
like  Beattie  and  a  genius  like  Adam  Smith.  Gray, 
studious  in  his  college  at  Cambridge,  is  exercising 
his  fastidious  talent ;  Collins'  sequestered,  carefully 
nurtured  muse  is  silent ;  a  host  of  minor  poets  are 
riding  Pope's  poetic  diction  and  heroic  couplet 
to  death.  Outside  scattered  about  is  the  van  of 
Romance  —  Percy  collecting  his  ballads  ;  Burns 
omnivorously  reading  the  "  bards  "  of  his  country- 
side ;  the  "  mad  "  people,  Smart  and  Chatterton, 
obscurely  beginning  the  work  that  was  to  come 
full-blown  in  Blake  and  finish  in  Wordsworth  and 
Coleridge  and  Keats. 

Of  Johnson's  set  the  most  remarkable  figure 
was  Edmund  Burke — "the  supreme  writer,"  as 
De  Quincey  called  him,  "of  his  century."  His 
writings  belong  more  to  the  history  of  politics 
than  to  that  of  literature,  and  a  close  examination 
of  them  would  be  out  of  place  here.  His  political 
theory  strikes  a  middle  course  which  offends— 
and  in  his  own  day  offended — both  parties  in  the 
common  strife  of  political  thinking.  He  believed 
the  best  government  to  consist  in  a  patriotic 
aristocracy,  ruling  for  the  good  of  the  people.  By 
birth  an  Irishman,  he  had  the  innate  practicality 
which  commonly  lies  beneath  the  flash  and  colour 
of  Irish  forcefulness  and  rhetoric.  That,  and  his 
historical  training,  which  influenced  him  in  the 
direction  of  conceiving  every  institution  as  the 


DR   JOHNSON   AND   HIS   TIME  183 

culmination  of  an  evolutionary  development,  sent 
him  directly  counter  to  the  newest  and  most 
enthusiastically  urged  political  philosophy  of  his 
day — the  philosophy  stated  by  Rousseau,  and  put 
in  action  by  the  French  Revolution.  He  disliked 
and  distrusted  "  metaphysical  theories,"  when  they 
left  the  field  of  speculation  for  that  of  practice, 
had  no  patience  with  "  natural  rights "  (which  as 
an  Irishman  he  conceived  as  the  product  of  senti- 
mentalism),  and  applied  what  would  nowadays  be 
called  a  "pragmatic"  test  to  political  affairs. 
Practice  was  the  touch-stone ;  a  theory  was  useless 
unless  you  could  prove  that  it  had  worked.  It 
followed  that  he  was  not  a  democrat,  opposed 
parliamentary  reform,  and  held  that  the  true 
remedy  for  corruption  and  venality  was  not  to 
increase  the  size  of  the  electorate,  but  to  reduce 
it  so  as  to  obtain  electors  of  greater  weight  and 
independence.  For  him  a  member  of  Parliament 
was  a  representative  and  not  a  delegate,  and  must 
act  not  on  his  elector's  wishes  but  on  his  own 
judgment.  These  opinions  are  little  in  fashion 
in  our  own  day,  but  it  is  well  to  remember  that 
in  Burke's  case  they  were  the  outcome  not  of 
prejudice  but  of  thought,  and  that  even  democracy 
may  admit  they  present  a  case  that  must  be  met 
and  answered. 

Burke's  reputation  as  a  thinker  has  suffered  some- 
what unjustly  as  a  result  of  his  refusal  to  square  his 
tenets  either  with  democracy  or  with  its  opposite. 


184  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

It  has  been  said  that  ideas  were  only  of  use  to  him 
so  far  as  they  were  of  polemical  service,  that  the 
amazing  fertility  and  acuteness  of  his  mind  worked 
only  in  a  not  too  scrupulous  determination  to  over- 
whelm his  antagonists  in  the  several  arguments— 
on  India,  or  America,  on  Ireland,  or  on  France— 
which  made  up  his  political  career.     He  was,  said 
Carlyle,  "  vehement  rather  than  earnest ;  a  resplen- 
dent far-sighted  rhetorician,  rather  than  a  deep  and 
earnest  thinker."     The  words  as  they  stand  would 
be  a  good  description  of  a  certain  type  of  politician ; 
they  would   fit,   for  instance,   very  well  on    Mr 
Gladstone;   but  they  do  Burke  less  than  justice. 
He  was  an  innovator  in  modern  political  thought, 
and  his  application  of  the  historical  method  to  the 
study  of  institutions  is  in  its  way  a  not  less  epoch- 
making  achievement   than   Bacon's  application  of 
the  inductive  method  to  science.     At  a  time  when 
current  political   thought,  led  by  Rousseau,   was 
drawing  its  theories  from  the  abstract  conception 
of  "natural  rights,"  Burke  was  laying  down  that 
sounder  and  deeper  notion  of  politics   which  has 
governed  thinking  in  that  department  of  knowledge 
since.     Besides  this,  he  had  face  to  face  with  the 
affairs  of  his  own  day  a  far-sightedness  and  saga- 
city which  kept  him  right  where  other  men  went 
wrong.     In  a  nation  of  the  blind  he  saw  the  truth 
about  the  American  colonies ;  he   predicted  with 
exactitude  the  culmination   of  the   revolution   in 
Napoleon.      Mere    rhetorical    vehemence    cannot 


DR  JOHNSON   AND   HIS  TIME  185 

explain  the  earnestness  with  which  in  a  day  of 
diplomatic  cynicism  he  preached  the  doctrine  of  an 
international  morality  as  strict  and  as  binding  as 
the  morality  which  exists  between  man  and  man. 
Surest  of  all,  we  have  the  testimony,  uninfluenced 
by  the  magic  of  language,  of  the  men  he  met. 
You  could  not,  said  Dr  Johnson,  shelter  with  him 
in  a  shed  for  a  few  moments  from  the  rain  without 
saying,  "This  is  an  extraordinary  man." 

His  literary  position  depends  chiefly  on  his  amaz- 
ing gift  of  expression,  on  a  command  of  language 
unapproached  by  any  writer  of  his  time.  His 
eloquence  (in  writing,  not  in  speaking ;  he  is  said  to 
have  had  a  monotonous  delivery)  was  no  doubt  at 
bottom  a  matter  of  race,  but  to  his  Irish  readiness 
and  fire  and  colour  he  added  the  strength  of  a  full 
mind,  fortified  by  a  wonderful  store  of  reading 
which  a  retentive  and  exact  memory  enabled  him 
to  bring  instantly  to  bear  on  the  subject  in  hand. 
No  writer  before  him,  except  Defoe,  had  such  a 
wide  knowledge  of  the  technicalities  of  different 
men's  occupations,  and  of  all  sorts  of  the  processes 
of  daily  business,  nor  could  enlighten  an  abstract 
matter  with  such  a  wealth  of  luminous  analogy. 
It  is  this  characteristic  of  his  style  which  has  led  to 
the  common  comparison  of  his  writing  with  Shake- 
speare's ;  both  seem  to  be  preternaturally  endowed 
with  more  information,  to  have  a  wider  sweep  of 
interest  than  ordinary  men.  Both  were  not  only, 
as  Matthew  Arnold  said  of  Burke,  "  saturated  with 


186  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

ideas,"  but  saturated  too  in  the  details  of  the  busi- 
ness and  desire  of  ordinary  men's  lives ;  nothing 
human  was  alien  to  them.  Burke's  language  is, 
therefore,  always  interesting  and  always  appropriate 
to  his  thought ;  it  is  also  on  occasion  very  beautiful. 
He  had  a  wonderful  command  of  clear  and  ringing 
utterance  and  could  appeal  when  he  liked  very 
powerfully  to  the  sensibilities  of  his  readers. 
Rhetoricians  are  seldom  free  from  occasional  ex- 
travagance, and  Burke  fell  under  the  common 
danger  of  his  kind.  He  had  his  moments  of  falsity, 
could  heap  coarse  and  outrageous  abuse  on  Warren 
Hastings,  illustrate  the  horrors  of  the  Revolution 
by  casting  a  dagger  on  the  floor  of  the  House  of 
Commons,  and  nourish  hatred  beyond  the  bounds 
of  justice  or  measure.  But  these  things  do  not 
affect  his  position,  nor  take  from  the  solid  great- 
ness of  his  work. 

Edward  Gibbon — after  Burke  the  greatest  prose 
writer  of  the  century — was  Johnson's  junior  by 
over  quarter  of  a  century,  and,  living  and  working 
much  abroad,  he  made  only  fitful  excursions  into 
the  Fleet  Street  set.  A  word  about  his  education 
and  upbringing  is  necessary  because  of  their 
remarkable  bearing  on  his  great  book.  In  his 
childhood  he  was  sickly ;  he  was  therefore  never 
sent  to  school,  and  what  knowledge  he  acquired  he 
got  from  a  faculty  for  omnivorous  and  desultory 
reading  to  which  temporary  masters  and  a  sister 
of  his  mother's  gave  occasional  direction.  At 


DR  JOHNSON   AND   HIS   TIME  187 

fifteen  he  was  entered  at  Magdalen  College,  Oxford, 
but  left  it  after  little  more  than  a  year's  residence — 
during  which  he  had  been  converted  to  the  Church 
of  Rome — for  Lausanne,  to  live  under  a  Swiss 
Protestant  pastor  to  whom  his  father  entrusted 
him,  in  order  to  effect  his  re-conversion  to  the 
Protestant  faith.  The  immediate  purpose  was 
successful,  but  the  five  years  which  he  spent  in 
Lausanne  were  perhaps  more  important  because 
it  was  during  them  that  he  began  to  carry  out 
conscientiously,  and  indeed  joyously,  that  course  of 
reading  and  study  which  was  to  be  the  foundation 
of  the  great  work  of  his  life.  At  the  age  of  twenty- 
four  he  returned  to  England  and  became  a  captain 
in  the  Hampshire  Militia,  in  which  he  served  for 
nearly  three  years.  As  he  himself  has  pointed  out 
in  a  famous  passage,  this  military  service,  no  less 
than  his  reading  in  Switzerland,  contributed  to 
preparing  him  for  the  great  work  of  his  life.  "  The 
discipline  and  conditions  of  a  modern  battalion 
gave  me  a  clear  notion  of  the  phalanx  and  the 
legion  ;  and  the  captain  of  the  Hampshire  grenadiers 
(the  reader  may  smile)  has  not  been  useless  to  the 
historian  of  the  Roman  Empire."  In  1763,  at  the 
conclusion  of  peace  after  the  Seven  Years'  War, 
the  militia  was  disbanded,  and  Gibbon  revisited 
the  continent  and  made  his  first  journey  in  Italy. 
Here  he  hit  upon  the  idea  which  gave  him  his 
great  book.  "  It  was  at  Rome,"  as  he  says  himself, 
"  on  the  15th  October,  1764,  as  I  sat  musing  amidst 


188  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

the  ruins  of  the  capitol  while  the  barefooted  friars 
were  singing  vespers  in  the  temple  of  Jupiter,  that 
the  idea  of  writing  the  decline  and  fall  of  the  city 
first  entered  into  my  mind."  Twelve  years  later 
the  first  volume — one-sixth  of  the  whole — appeared, 
and  made  its  author  famous.  A  century  and  a 
half  of  laborious  historical  research  since  has  left 
his  fame  undimmed ;  the  Decline  and  Fall  of  the 
Roman  Empire  is  still  the  standard  book  on  its 
subject,  and  it  would  be  hard  to  think  of  a  com- 
petitor, whether  ancient  or  modern,  entitled  to 
dispute  with  it  the  first  place  in  the  whole  of 
historical  literature. 

The  qualities  which  have  given  the  book  its 
permanence  and  pre-eminence  are  not  difficult  to 
divine,  though  only  one  side  of  them  concerns  our 
purpose  here.  It  is  agreed  by  those  competent  to 
judge  that  he  performed  the  astonishing  feat  of 
mastering  all  the  vast  materials  which  were  available 
to  him,  that  he  kept  them  in  an  ordered  proportion 
in  his  mind,  that  he  showed  wonderful  acumen  and 
judgment  in  his  critical  use  of  them,  and  that  on 
points  which  they  left  obscure,  and  which  subse- 
quent discussions  have  elucidated,  his  inferences 
were  generally — almost  invariably — correct.  But 
this  fullness  and  correctness,  though  it  would  have 
preserved  him  from  obsolescence  as  a  text-book  and 
maintained  his  fame  in  the  universities,  would  not 
have  made  him  the  great  literary  figure  that  he  is. 
He  owes  that  partly  to  the  mere  magnitude  of  the 


DR  JOHNSON   AND   HIS  TIME  189 

task  which  he  accomplished,  partly  to  the  temper 
in  which  he  approached  it,  and  partly  to  the  style 
in  which  he  carried  it  through.  "  A  great  point  in 
favour  of  Gibbon,"  says  one  of  his  best  critics  with 
some  humour,  "is  the  existence  of  his  history," 
and  indeed  in  this  matter  he  stands  alone 
amongst  modern  historians.  Think  of  Macaulay 
struggling  with  masses  of  material,  overwhelmed 
with  the  weight  of  newspapers,  pamphlets,  state- 
papers,  and  despatches,  and  leaving  his  great  work 
a  mere  fragment  of  what  he  intended  to  do. 
Modern  historical  research  has  given  the  attempt 
up  in  frank  despair ;  it  finds  so  much  to  read  that 
it  has  no  time  to  write;  a  single  monograph  on  such 
a  thing  as  Gibbon  would  have  compressed  into  one 
balanced  sentence  exhausts  the  energies  of  its  pro- 
fessors, and  when  it  attempts  universal  history  it 
does  so  on  a  co-operative  basis.  Gibbon  conceived 
a  plan  as  voluminous  as  any  of  those  devised  by 
the  learned  syndicates  of  to-day,  embracing  the 
greatest  transition  in  history,  the  foundation  of 
modern  civilization  and  the  growth  and  establish- 
ment of  the  world's  two  chief  religions,  and  he 
carried  it  through  to  the  end,  preserving  absolutely 
the  proportion  with  which  he  began.  Parts  of  his 
book,  taken  out  of  it  by  themselves,  might  have 
given  him  an  eminence  almost  as  great  as  did  the 
whole.  "  It  is  melancholy  to  say  it,"  wrote  Cardinal 
Newman,  "  but  the  chief,  perhaps  the  only  English 
writer  who  has  any  claim  to  be  considered  an 


190  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

ecclesiastical  historian,  is  Gibbon."  This  of  his  two 
chapters  on  Christianity  and  his  later  sections  on 
the  heresies  and  the  crusades,  but  a  similar  tribute 
might  be  paid  to  his  picture  of  the  barbarian 
invasions  which  destroyed  the  Empire  of  the  West, 
or  to  the  complete  history  of  the  rise  and  decline 
of  that  of  the  East  with  which  his  book  ends. 
He  excels,  as  no  historian  had  before  him  and  none 
since,  in  magnitude  and  completeness. 

It  was  the  bent  of  his  mind,  the  temper  in  which 
he  approached  men  and  institutions,  as  much  as 
his  industry,  that  enabled  him  to  attain  this  excel- 
lence. He  had  what  may  be  called  a  masculine 
tone  ;  a  firm,  strong,  perspicuous  narration  of  matter 
of  fact,  a  capacity  for  plain  argument,  a  contempt 
for  everything  which  plain  and  definite  people  could 
not  thoroughly  comprehend.  He  had,  too,  what 
was  characteristic  of  his  age,  a  certain  classical 
moderation  of  judgment  which  saved  him  from  the 
idiosyncrasies  of  likes  and  dislikes  which  have 
damaged  the  work  of  other  historians,  like,  for 
instance,  Mommsen  or  Froude.  "The  cautious 
scepticism  of  his  cold  intellect,  which  disinclined 
him  to  every  extreme,  depreciates  great  virtues  and 
extenuates  great  vices."  He  does  not  engage 
himself  on  a  side ;  the  irony  which  critics  of  his 
chapters  on  Christianity  found  offensive  is  in  all 
the  other  chapters  as  well  and  lends  them  just  that 
detachment,  that  command  over  the  circumstances 
he  is  describing,  that  keeps  the  reader's  interest  alive 


DR  JOHNSON   AND   HIS   TIME  191 

where  mere  bald  narration  would  soon  leave  it  cold. 
He  feels  that  you  are  entitled  to  some  definite 
judgment,  some  finding  on  the  facts,  and  he  sees  to 
it  that  this  finding  is  balanced  and  judicial,  allowing 
due  weight  to  all  points  of  view.  It  is,  of  course, 
this  temper  and  bent  of  mind  which  created  more 
than  anything  else  the  peculiar  style  which  we  know 
so  well.  Space  and  time  pressed  upon  him;  judg- 
ments had  therefore  to  be  conveyed  by  an  epithet 
rather  than  a  sentence,  by  a  sentence  rather  than 
by  a  paragraph.  The  history  had  to  keep  marching 
along,  and  it  is  perhaps  the  greatest  merit  of  its 
style  that  it  gives  you  just  this  sense  of  consistent 
steady  pace,  "like  a  Roman  legion  marching 
through  troubled  country — a  type  of  order  and  an 
emblem  of  civilisation."  Certainly  no  instrument 
could  have  been  better  fitted  to  the  purpose.  No 
one  has  improved  on  it  since. 

Boswell  we  have  seen  ;  after  Burke  and  Boswell, 
Goldsmith  was  the  most  brilliant  member  of  the 
regular  Johnson  circle.  If  part  of  Burke's  genius 
is  referable  to  his  nationality,  Goldsmith's  is  wholly 
so.  The  beginning  and  the  end  of  him  was  Irish  ; 
every  quality  he  possessed  as  a  man  and  as  a  writer 
belongs  to  his  race.  He  had  the  Irish  carelessness, 
the  Irish  generosity,  the  Irish  quick  temper,  the 
Irish  humour.  This  latter  gift,  displayed  constantly 
in  a  company  which  had  little  knowledge  of  the 
peculiar  quality  of  Irish  wit  and  no  faculty  of 
sympathy  or  imagination,  is  at  the  bottom  of  the 


192  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

constant  depreciation  of  him  on  the  part  of  Boswell 
and  others  of  his  set.  His  mock  self-importance 
they  thought  ill-breeding ;  his  humorous  self- 
depreciation  and  keen  sense  of  his  own  ridiculous- 
ness, mere  lack  of  dignity  and  folly.  It  is  curious 
to  read  Boswell  and  watch  how  often  Goldsmith, 
without  Boswell's  knowing  it,  got  the  best  of  the 
joke.  In  writing  he  had  what  we  can  now  recognize 
as  peculiarly  Irish  gifts.  All  our  modern  writers 
of  light  half- farcical  comedy  are  Irish.  Goldsmith's 
She  Stoops  to  Conquer  is  only  the  first  of  a  series 
which  includes  The  School  for  Scandal,  The  Import- 
ance of  being  Earnest,  and  You  Never  can  TelL 
And  his  essays — particularly  those  of  the  Citizen 
of  the  World  with  its  Chinese  vision  of  England 
and  English  life — are  the  first  fruit  of  that  Irish 
detachment,  that  ability  to  see  "  normally  "  English 
habits  and  institutions  and  foibles  which  in  our 
own  day  has  given  us  the  prefaces  of  Mr  Shaw. 
As  a  writer  Goldsmith  has  a  lightness  and  delicate 
ease  which  belong  rather  to  the  school  of  the 
earlier  eighteenth  century  than  to  his  own  day; 
the  enthusiasm  of  Addison  for  French  literature 
which  he  retained  gave  him  a  more  graceful  model 
than  the  "Johnsonian"  school,  to  which  he  pro- 
fessed himself  to  belong,  could  afford. 

(3) 

The  eighteenth-century  novel  demands  separate 
treatment,  and  the  other  prose  authors  belong  to 


DR  JOHNSON   AND   HIS  TIME  198 

historical   or  philosophical  rather  than  to  literary 
studies.     It  is  time  to  turn  to  poetry. 

There  orthodox  classicism  still  held  sway:  the 
manner  and  metre  of  Pope  or  Thomson  ruled  the 
roost  of  singing  fowl.  In  the  main  it  had  done  its 
work,  and  the  bulk  of  fresh  things  conceived  in  it 
were  dull  and  imitative,  even  though  occasionally, 
as  in  the  poems  of  Johnson  himself  and  of  Gold- 
smith, an  author  arose  who  was  able  to  infuse 
sincerity  and  emotion  into  a  fast-dying  convention. 
The  classic  manner — now  more  that  of  Thomson 
than  of  Pope — persisted  till  it  overlapped  roman- 
ticism ;  Cowper  and  Crabbe  each  owe  a  doubtful 
allegiance,  leaning  by  their  formal  metre  and  level 
monotony  of  thought  to  the  one  and  by  their 
realism  to  the  other.  In  the  meantime  its  popu- 
larity and  its  assured  position  were  beginning  to  be 
assailed  in  the  coteries  by  the  work  of  two  new 
poets. 

The  output  of  Thomas  Gray  and  William  Collins 
was  small ;  you  might  almost  read  the  complete 
poetical  works  of  either  in  an  evening.  But  for 
all  that  they  mark  a  period;  they  are  the  first 
definite  break  with  the  classic  convention  which 
had  been  triumphant  for  upwards  of  seventy 
years  when  their  prime  came.  It  is  a  break,  how- 
ever, in  style  rather  than  in  essentials,  and  a  reader 
who  seeks  in  them  the  inspiriting  freshness  which 
came  later  with  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  will 

be  disappointed.     Their  carefully  drawn  still  wine 

13 


194  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

tastes  insipidly  after  the  "  beaded  bubbles  winking 
at  the  brim "  of  romance.  They  are  fastidious 
and  academic  ;  they  lack  the  authentic  fire ;  their 
poetry  is  "made"  poetry  like  Tennyson's  and 
Matthew  Arnold's.  On  their  comparative  merits 
a  deal  of  critical  ink  has  been  spilt.  Arnold's 
characterization  of  Gray  is  well  known — "  he  never 
spoke  out."  Sterility  fell  upon  him  because  he 
lived  in  an  age  of  prose  just  as  it  fell  upon  Arnold 
himself  because  he  lived  too  much  immersed  in 
business  and  routine.  But  in  what  he  wrote  he 
had  the  genuine  poetic  gift — the  gift  of  insight  and 
feeling.  Against  this,  Swinburne  with  character- 
istic vehemence  raised  the  standard  of  Collins,  the 
latchet  of  whose  shoe  Gray,  as  a  lyric  poet,  was 
not  worthy  to  unloose.  "  The  muse  gave  birth  to 
Collins,  she  did  but  give  suck  to  Gray."  It  is 
more  to  our  point  to  observe  that  neither,  though 
their  work  abounds  in  felicities  and  in  touches  of  a 
genuine  poetic  sense,  was  fitted  to  raise  the  standard 
of  revolt.  Revolution  is  for  another  and  braver 
kind  of  genius  than  theirs.  Romanticism  had  to 
wait  for  Burns  and  Blake. 

In  every  country  at  any  one  time  there  are  in 
all  probability  not  one  but  several  literatures 
flourishing.  The  main  stream  flowing  through  the 
publishers  and  booksellers,  conned  by  critics  and 
coteries,  recognized  as  the  national  literature,  is 
commonly  only  the  largest  of  several  channels  of 
thought.  There  are  besides  the  national  literature 


DR  JOHNSON   AND   HIS  TIME  195 

local  literatures  -  -  books,  that  is,  are  published 
which  enjoy  popularity  and  critical  esteem  in  their 
own  county  or  parish  and  are  utterly  unknown 
outside;  there  may  even  be  (indeed,  there  are  in 
several  parts  of  the  country)  distinct  local  schools 
of  writing  and  dynasties  of  local  authors.  These 
localized  literatures  rarely  become  known  to  the 
outside  world ;  the  national  literature  takes  little 
account  of  them,  though  their  existence  and  prob- 
ably some  special  knowledge  of  one  or  other  of 
them  is  within  the  experience  of  most  of  us.  But 
every  now  and  again  some  one  of  their  authors 
transcends  his  local  importance,  gives  evidence  of 
a  genius  which  is  not  to  be  denied  even  by  those 
who  normally  have  not  the  knowledge  to  appreciate 
the  particular  flavour  of  locality  which  his  writings 
impart,  and  becomes  a  national  figure.  While  he 
lives  and  works  the  national  and  his  local  stream 
write  and  flow  together. 

This  was  the  case  of  Robert  Burns.  All  his  life 
long  he  was  the  singer  of  a  parish — the  last  of  a 
long  line  of  forebears  who  had  used  the  Scottish 
lowland  vernacular  to  rhyme  in  about  their  neigh- 
bours and  their  scandals,  their  loves  and  their 
church.  Himself  at  the  confluence  of  the  two 
streams,  the  national  and  the  local,  he  pays  his 
tribute  to  two  sets  of  originals,  talks  with  equal 
reverence  of  names  known  to  us  like  Pope  and 
Gray  and  Shenstone  and  names  unknown  which 
belonged  to  local  "  bards,"  as  he  would  have  called 


196  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

them,  who  wrote  their  poems  for  an  Ayrshire  public. 
If  he  came  upon  England  as  an  innovator,  it  was 
simply  because  he  brought  with  him  the  highly 
individualized  style  of  Scottish  local  vernacular 
verse ;  to  his  own  people  he  was  no  innovator  but 
a  fulfilment ;  as  his  best  critic l  says,  he  brought 
nothing  to  the  literature  he  became  a  part  of  but 
himself.  His  daring  and  splendid  genius  made  the 
local  universal,  raised  out  of  rough  and  cynical 
satirizing  a  style  as  rich  and  humorous  and 
astringent  as  that  of  Rabelais,  lent  inevitableness 
and  pathos  and  romance  to  lyric  and  song.  But 
he  was  content  to  better  the  work  of  other  men. 
He  made  hardly  anything  new. 

Stevenson  in  his  essay  on  Burns  remarks  his 
readiness  to  use  up  the  work  of  others  or  take  a 
large  hint  from  it  "  as  if  he  had  some  difficulty  in 
commencing."  He  omits  to  observe  that  the  very 
same  trait  applies  to  other  great  artists.  There 
seem  to  be  two  orders  of  creative  writers.  On  the 
one  hand  are  the  innovators,  the  new  men  like 
Blake,  Wordsworth,  Byron  and  Shelley,  and  later 
Browning.  These  men  owe  little  to  their  pre- 
decessors ;  they  work  on  their  own  devices  and 
construct  their  medium  afresh  for  themselves. 
Commonly  their  fame  and  acceptance  is  slow,  for 
they  speak  in  an  unfamiliar  tongue  and  they  have 
to  educate  a  generation  to  understand  their  wrork. 
The  other  order  of  artists  has  to  be  shown  the 

i  W.  E.  Henley,  Essay  on  Burns.     Works,  David  Nutt. 


DR  JOHNSON   AND   HIS  TIME  197 

way.     They  have  little  fertility  in  construction  or 
invention.      You  have  to  say  to  them,  "Here  is 
something  that  you  could  do  too ;  go  and  do  it 
better  " ;  or  "  Here  is  a  story  to  work  on,  or  a  refrain 
of  a  song ;  take  it  and  give  it  your  subtlety,  your 
music."     The   villainy  you   teach  them   they  will 
use,  and  it  will  go  hard  with  them  if  they  do  not 
better  the  invention ;  but  they  do  not  invent  for 
themselves.     To  this  order  of  artists  Burns,  like 
Shakespeare,  and  among  the  lesser  men  Tennyson, 
belongs.     In  all  his  plays  Shakespeare  is  known  to 
have  invented  only  one  plot ;  in  many  he  is  using 
not   only  the   structure   but  in   many  places   the 
words   devised  by  an  older   author ;   his  mode   of 
treatment  depends  on  the  conventions  common  in 
his  day,  on  the  tragedy  of  blood  and  madness  and 
revenge,  on/the  comedy  of  intrigue  and  disguises, 
on   the  romance  with  its  strange  happenings  and 
its  reuniting   of  long-parted  friends.     Burns  goes 
the  same  way  to  work  ;  scarcely  a  page  of  his  but 
shows   traces   of  some    original    in    the    Scottish 
vernacular   school.     The   elegy,  the  verse  epistle, 
the  satirical  form  of  Holy  Willies  Prayer,  the  song 
and  recitative  of  The  Jolly  Beggars,  are  all  to  be 
found  in  his  predecessors,  in  Fergusson,  Ramsay, 
and  the  local  poets  of  the  south-west  of  Scotland. 
In  the  songs  often  whole  verses,  nearly  always  the 
refrains,  are  from  older  folk  poetry.     What  he  did 
was  to  pour  into   these  forms   the  incomparable 
richness  of  a  personality  whose  fire  and  brilliance 


198  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

and  humour  transcended  all  locality  and  all  tradi- 
tion, a  personality  which  strode  like  a  colossus  over 
the  formalism  and  correctness  of  his  time.  His 
use  of  familiar  forms  explains,  more  than  anything 
else,  his  immediate  fame.  His  countrymen  were 
ready  for  him  ;  they  could  hail  him  on  the  instant 
(just  as  an  Elizabethan  audience  could  hail  Shake- 
speare) as  something  familiar  and  at  the  same  time 
more  splendid  than  anything  they  knew.  He 
spoke  in  a  tongue  they  could  understand. 

It  is  impossible  to  judge  Burns  from  his  purely 
English  verse ;  though  he  did  it  as  well  as  any  of 
the  minor  followers  of  the  school  of  Pope,  he  did  it 
no  better.  Only  the  weakest  side  of  his  character 
— his  sentimentalism — finds  expression  in  it ;  he 
had  not  the  sense  of  tradition  nor  the  intimate 
knowledge  necessary  to  use  English  to  the  highest 
poetic  effect ;  it  was  indeed  a  foreign  tongue  to 
him.  In  the  vernacular  he  wrote  the  language  he 
spoke,  a  language  whose  natural  force  and  colour 
had  become  enriched  by  three  centuries  of  literary 
use,  which  was  capable,  too,  of  effects  of  humour 
and  realism  impossible  in  any  tongue  spoken  out  of 
reach  of  the  soil.  It  held  within  it  an  unmatched 
faculty  for  pathos,  a  capacity  for  expressing  a 
lambent  and  kindly  humour,  a  power  of  pungency 
in  satire  and  a  descriptive  vividness  that  English 
could  not  give.  How  express  in  the  language  of 
Pope  or  even  of  Wordsworth  an  effect  like 
this  ?— 


DR  JOHNSON   AND   HIS  TIME  199 

"  They  reePd,  they  set,  they  cross'd,  they  cleekit, 
Till  ilka  carlin  swat  and  reekit, 
And  coost  her  duddies  to  the  wark, 
And  linket  at  it  in  her  sark." 

or  this : — 

"  Yestreen,  when  to  the  trembling  string 

The  dance  gaed  thro**  the  lighted  ha', 
To  thee  my  fancy  took  its  wing — 

I  sat,  but  neither  heard  nor  saw : 
Tho1  this  was  fair,  and  that  was  braw, 

And  yon  the  toast  of  sC  the  town, 
I  sigh'd,  and  said,  amang  them  a1, 

'  Ye  are  na  Marv  Morison.' " 

•/ 

It  may  be  objected  that  in  all  this  there  is  only 
one  word,  and  but  two  or  three  forms  of  words, 
that  are  not  English.  But  the  accent,  the  rhythm, 
the  air  of  it  are  all  Scots,  and  it  was  a  Burns 
thinking  in  his  native  tongue  who  wrote  it,  not  the 
Burns  of 

"  Anticipation  forward  points  the  view  " ; 
or 

"  Pleasures  are  like  poppies  spread, 
You  grasp  the  flower,  the  bloom  is  shed," 

or   any   other   of  the   exercises   in   the   school  of 
Thomson  and  Pope. 

It  is  easy  to  see  that  though  Burns  admired  un- 
affectedly the  "  Classic  "  writers,  his  native  realism 
and  his  melody  made  him  a  potent  agent  in  the 
cause  of  naturalism  and  romance.  In  his  ideas, 
even  more  than  in  his  style,  he  belongs  to  the  on- 
coming school.  The  French  Revolution,  which 
broke  upon  Europe  when  he  was  at  the  height  of 


200  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

his  career,  found  him  already  converted  to  its 
principles.  As  a  peasant,  particularly  a  Scotch 
peasant,  he  believed  passionately  in  the  native 
worth  of  man  as  man  and  gave  ringing  expression 
to  it  in  his  verse.  In  his  youth  his  liberal-minded- 
ness  made  him  a  Jacobite  out  of  mere  antagonism 
to  the  existing  regime ;  the  Revolution  only  dis- 
covered for  him  the  more  logical  republican  creed. 
As  the  leader  of  a  loose-living,  hard-drinking  set, 
such  as  was  to  be  found  in  every  parish,  he  was  a 
determined  and  free-spoken  enemy  of  the  kirk, 
whose  tyranny  he  several  times  encountered.  In 
his  writing  he  is  as  vehement  an  anti-clerical  as 
Shelley,  and  much  more  practical.  The  political 
side  of  Romanticism,  in  fact,  which  in  England  had 
to  wait  for  Byron  and  Shelley,  is  already  full-grown 
in  his  work.  He  anticipates  and  gives  complete 
expression  to  one  half  of  the  Romantic  movement. 
What  Burns  did  for  the  idea  of  liberty,  Blake 
did  for  that  and  every  other  idea  current  among 
Wordsworth  and  his  successors.  There  is  nothing 
stranger  in  the  history  of  English  literature  than 
the  miracle  by  which  this  poet  and  artist,  working 
in  obscurity,  utterly  unknown  to  the  literary  world 
that  existed  outside  him,  summed  up  in  himself  all 
the  thoughts  and  tendencies  which  were  the  fruit 
of  anxious  discussion  and  propaganda  on  the  part 
of  the  authors — Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  Lamb— 
who  believed  themselves  to  be  the  discoverers  of 
fresh  truth  unknown  to  their  generation,  The  con- 


DR  JOHNSON   AND  HIS  TIME  201 

temporary  and  independent  discovery  by  Wallace 
and  Darwin  of  the  principle  of  natural  selection 
furnishes,  perhaps,  a  rough  parallel,  but  the  fact 
serves  to  show  how  impalpable  and  universal  is 
the  spread  of  ideas,  how  impossible  it  is  to  settle 
literary  indebtedness  or  construct  literary  genealogy 
with  any  hope  of  accuracy.  Blake,  by  himself, 
held  and  expressed  quite  calmly  that  condemnation 
of  the  "Classic"  school  that  Wordsworth  and 
Coleridge  proclaimed  against  the  opposition  of  a 
deriding  world.  As  was  his  habit,  he  compressed 
it  into  a  rude  epigram  : 

"  Great  things  are  done  when  men  and  mountains  meet ; 
This  is  not  done  by  jostling  in  the  street." 

The  case  for  nature  against  urbanity  could  not 
be  more  tersely  stated  than  that.  The  German 
metaphysical  doctrine,  which  was  the  deepest  part 
of  the  teaching  of  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  and 
their  main  discovery,  he  expresses  as  curtly  and 
off-handedly : 

"  The  sun's  light  when  he  unfolds  it, 
Depends  on  the  organ  that  beholds  it." 

In  the  realm  of  childhood  and  innocence,  which 
Wordsworth  entered  fearfully  and  pathetically  as 
an  alien  traveller,  he  moves  with  the  simple  and 
assured  ease  of  one  native.  He  knows  the  mystical 
wonder  and  horror  that  Coleridge  set  forth  in  The 
Ancient  Mariner.  As  for  the  beliefs  of  Shelley, 
they  are  already  fully  developed  in  his  poems. 


202  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

"  The  king  and  the  priest  are  types  of  the  oppressor ; 
humanity  is  crippled  by  6  mind-forg'd  manacles ' ; 
love  is  enslaved  to  the  moral  law,  which  is  broken 
by  the  Saviour  of  mankind  ;  and,  even  more  subtly 
than  by  Shelley,  life  is  pictured  by  Blake  as  a  deceit 
and  a  disguise  veiling  from  us  the  beams  of  the 
Eternal."1 

In  truth,  Blake,  despite  the  imputation  of  in- 
sanity which  was  his  contemporaries'  and  has  later 
been  his  commentators'  refuge  from  assenting  to 
his  conclusions,  is  a  thinker  at  once  bold  and 
entirely  consistent.  An  absolute  unity  of  belief 
inspires  all  his  utterances,  cryptic  and  plain.  That 
he  never  succeeded  in  founding  a  school  nor 
gathering  followers  must  be  put  down  in  the  first 
place  to  the  form  in  which  his  work  was  issued 
(it  never  reached  the  public  of  his  own  day)  and  to 
the  dark  and  mysterious  mythology  in  which  the 
prophetic  books,  which  are  the  full  and  extended 
statement  of  his  philosophy,  are  couched,  and  in 
the  second  place  to  the  inherent  difficulty  of  the 
philosophy  itself.  As  he  himself  says,  where  we 
read  black,  he  reads  white.  For  the  common 
distinction  between  good  and  evil,  Blake  substitutes 
the  distinction  between  imagination  and  reason ; 
and  reason,  the  rationalizing,  measuring,  comparing 
faculty  by  which  we  come  to  impute  praise  or 
blame,  is  the  only  evil  in  his  eyes.  "There  is 
nothing  either  good  or  bad  but  thinking  makes  it 

1  Prof.  Raleigh. 


DR  JOHNSON   AND    HIS   TIME  203 

so  "  ;  to  rid  the  world  of  thinking,  to  substitute  for 
reason,  imagination,  and  for  thought,  vision,  was 
the  object  of  all  that  he  wrote  or  drew.  The 
implications  of  this  philosophy  carry  far,  and  Blake 
was  not  afraid  to  follow  where  they  led  him. 
Fortunately  for  those  who  hesitate  to  embark  on 
that  dark  and  adventurous  journey,  his  work  con- 
tains delightful  and  simpler  things.  He  wrote 
lyrics  of  extraordinary  freshness  and  delicacy  and 
spontaneity;  he  could  speak  in  a  child's  voice  of 
innocent  joys  and  sorrows  and  the  simple  elemental 
things.  His  odes  to  "  Spring "  and  "  Autumn "  >  s 
are  the  harbingers  of  Keats.  Not  since  Shake-  I/ 
speare  and  Campion  died  could  English  show  songs 

like  his 

"  My  silks  and  fine  array," 

and  the  others  which  carry  the  Elizabethan  accent. 
He  could  write  these  things  as  well  as  the  Eliza- 
bethans. In  others  he  was  unique. 

"  Tiger  1  Tiger !  burning  bright 
In  the  forests  of  the  night, 
What  immortal  hand  or  eye 
Could  frame  thy  fearful  symmetry  ?  " 

In  all  the  English  lyric  there  is  no  voice  so  clear, 
so  separate  or  distinctive  as  his. 


CHAPTER   VII 

THE    ROMANTIC    REVIVAL 

(1) 

THERE  are  two  ways  of  approaching  the  periods 
of  change  and  new  birth  in  literature.  The 
commonest  and,  for  all  the  study  which  it  entails, 
the  easiest,  is  that  summed  up  in  the  phrase, 
literature  begets  literature.  Following  it,  you 
discover  and  weigh  literary  influences,  the  in- 
fluence of  poet  on  poet,  and  book  on  book.  You 
find  one  man  harking  back  to  earlier  models  in  his 
own  tongue,  which  an  intervening  age  misunder- 
stood or  despised ;  another,  turning  to  the  con- 
temporary literatures  of  neighbouring  countries ; 
another,  perhaps,  to  the  splendour  and  exoticism 
of  the  East.  In  the  matter  of  form  and  style, 
such  a  study  carries  you  far.  You  can  trace  types 
of  poetry  and  metres  back  to  curious  and  unsus- 
pected originals,  find  the  well-known  verse  of 
Burns'  epistles  turning  up  in  Proven9al;  Tennyson's 
In  Memoriam  stanza  in  use  by  Ben  Jonson ;  the 
metre  of  Christabel  in  minor  Elizabethan  poetry ; 
the  peculiar  form  of  FitzGerald's  translation  of 
Omar  Khayyam  followed  by  so  many  imitators 

204 


THE   ROMANTIC   REVIVAL  205 

since,  itself  to  be  the  actual  reflection  of  the  rough 
metrical  scheme  of  his  Persian  original.  But  such 
a  study,  though  it  is  profitable  and  interesting,  can 
never  lead  to  the  whole  truth.  As  we  saw  in  the 
beginning  of  this  book,  in  the  matter  of  the 
Renaissance,  every  age  of  discovery  and  re-birth 
has  its  double  aspect.  It  is  a  revolution  in  style 
and  language,  an  age  of  literary  experiment  and 
achievement,  but  its  experiments  are  dictated  by 
the  excitement  of  a  new  subject-matter,  and  that 
subject-matter  is  so  much  in  the  air,  so  impalpable 
and  universal,  that  it  eludes  analysis.  Only  you 
can  be  sure  that  it  is  this  weltering  contagion  of 
jiew  ideas,  and  new  thought — the  "  Zeitgeist,"  the 
spirit  of  the  age,  or  whatever  you  may  call  it — 
that  is  the  essential  and  controlling  force.  Literary 
loans  and  imports  give  the  forms  into  which  it  can 
be  moulded,  but  without  them  it  would  still  exist, 
and  they  are  only  the  means  by  which  a  spirit 
which  is  in  life  itself,  and  which  expresses  itself 
in  action,  and  in  concrete  human  achievement, 
gets  itself  into  the  written  word.  The  romantic 
revival  numbers  Napoleon  amongst  its  leaders  as 
well  as  Byron,  Wellington,  Pitt  and  Wilberforce, 
as  well  as  Keats  and  Wordsworth.  Only  the 
literary  manifestations  of  the  time  concern  us  here, 
but  it  is  important  to  remember  that  the  passion 
for  simplification  and  for  a  return  to  nature  as  a 
refuge  from  the  artificial  complexities  of  society, 
which  inspired  the  Lyrical  Ballads,  inspired  no 


206  ENGLISH    LITERATURE 

less  the  course  of  the  Revolution  in  France,  and 
later,  the  destruction  by  Napoleon  of  the  smaller 
feudal  states  of  Germany,  which  made  possible 
German  nationality  and  a  national  spirit. 

In  this  romantic  revival,  however,  the  revolu- 
tion in  form  and  style  matters  more  than  in  most. 
The  Classicism  of  the  previous  age  had  been  so 
fixed  and  immutable ;  it  had  been  enthroned  in 
high  places,  enjoyed  the  esteem  of  society,  arro- 
gated to  itself  the  acceptance  which  good  breeding 
and  good  manners  demanded.  Dryden  had  been 
a  Court  poet,  careful  to  change  his  allegiance 
with  the  changing  monarchy.  Pope  had  been  the 
equal  and  intimate  of  the  great  people  of  his  day, 
and  his  followers,  if  they  did  not  enjoy  the  equality, 
enjoyed  at  any  rate  the  patronage  of  many  noble 
lords.  The  effect  of  this  was  to  give  the  prestige 
of  social  usage  to  the  verse  in  which  they  wrote 
and  the  language  they  used.  "There  was,"  said 
Dr  Johnson,  "before  the  time  of  Dryden  no 
poetical  diction,  no  system  of  words  at  once  re- 
fined from  the  grossness  of  domestic  use,  and 
free  from  the  harshness  of  terms  appropriated  to 
particular  arts.  Words  too  familiar  or  too  remote 
to  defeat  the  purpose  of  a  poet."  This  poetic  dic- 
tion, refined  from  the  grossness  of  domestic  use, 
was  the  standard  poetic  speech  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  The  heroic  couplet  in  which  it  was 
cast  was  the  standard  metre.  So  that  the  first 
object  of  the  revolt  of  the  Romantics  was  the 


THE   ROMANTIC   REVIVAL  207 

purely  literary  object  of  getting  rid  of  the  vice 
of  an  unreal  and  artificial  manner  of  writing. 
They  desired  simplicity  of  style. 

When  the  Lyrical  Ballads  of  Wordsworth  and 
Coleridge   were    published    in    1798,   the-  preface 
which  Wordsworth  wrote  as  their  manifesto  hardly 
touched  at  all  on  the   poetic  imagination   or  the 
attitude  of  the  poet  to  life  and  nature.     The  only 
question  is  that  of  diction.     "  The  majority  of  the 
following  poems,"  he  writes,  "  are  to  be  considered 
as  experiments.     They  were   written  chiefly  with 
a  view  to  ascertain  how  far  the  language  of  con- 
versation in  the  middle  and  lower  classes  of  society 
is   adapted   to   the   purposes   of  poetic   pleasure." 
And  in  the  longer  preface  to  the  second  edition, 
in  which  the  theories  of  the  new  school   on   the 
nature  and  methods  of  the  poetic  imagination  are 
set  forth  at  length,  he  returns  to  the  same  point. 
"The  language,  too,  of  these  men  (that  is  those 
in  humble  and  rustic  life)  has  been  adopted  .  .  . 
because  such   men   hourly  communicate  with  the 
best  objects  from  which  the  best  part  of  language 
is  originally  derived,  and  because  from  their  rank 
in  society,  and  the  sameness  and  narrow  circle  of 
their  intercourse,   being  less   under  the  influence 
of  social   vanity,  they  convey  their  feelings   and 
notions  in  simple  unelaborated  expressions."    Social 
vanity — the    armour   which   we   wear    to   conceal 
our    deepest    thoughts    and    feelings  —  that    was 
what    Wordsworth   wished  to  be   rid   of,  and   he 


208  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

chose  the  language  of  the  common 'people,  not 
because  it  fitted,  as  an  earlier  school  of  poets  who 
used  the  common  speech  had  asserted,  the  utter- 
ance of  habitual  feeling  and  common  sense,  but 
because  it  is  the  most  sincere  expression  of  the 
deepest  and  rarest  passion.  His  object  was  the 
object  attained  by  Shakespeare  in  some  of  his 
supremest  moments;  the  bare  intolerable  force  of 
the  speeches  after  the  murder  in  Macbeth,  or  of 
King  Lear's 

"  Do  not  laugh  at  me. 
For  as  I  am  a  man,  I  think  this  lady 
To  be  my  child  Cordelia." 

Here,  then,  was  one  avenue  of  revolt  from  the 
tyranny  of  artificiality,  the  getting  back  of  common 
speech  into  poetry.  But  there  was  another,  earlier 
and  more  potent  in  its  effect.  The  eighteenth 
century,  weary  of  its  own  good  sense  and  sanity, 
turned  to  the  Middle  Ages  for  picturesqueness  and 
relief.  Romance,  of  course,  had  not  been  dead  in 
all  these  years,  when  Pope  and  Addison  made  wit 
and  good  sense  the  fashionable  temper  for  writing. 
There  was  a  strong  romantic  tradition  in  the 
eighteenth  century,  though  it  does  not  give  its 
character  to  the  writing  of  the  time.  Dr  Johnson 
was  fond  of  old  romances.  When  he  was  in  Skye 
he  amused  himself  by  thinking  of  his  Scottish  tour 
as  the  journey  of  a  knight-errant.  "  These  fictions 
of  the  Gothic  romances,"  he  said,  "are  not  so 
remote  from  credibility  as  is  commonly  supposed." 


THE   ROMANTIC   REVIVAL  209 

It  is  a  mistake  to  suppose  that  the  passion  for 
medisevalism  began  with  either  Coleridge  or  Scott. 
Horace   Walpole  was  as  enthusiastic  as  either  of 
them  ;  good  eighteenth-century  prelates  like  Hurd 
and  Percy  found  in  what  they  called  the  Gothic 
an  inexhaustible  source  of  delight.     As  was  natural, 
what  attracted  them  in  the  Middle  Ages  was  not 
their  resemblances  to  the  time  they  lived  in,  but 
the  points  in  which   the   two   differed.     None   of 
them  had  knowledge  enough,  or  insight   enough, 
to  conceive  or  sympathize  with  the   humanity  of 
the  thirteenth  century,  to  shudder  at  its  cruelties 
and  hardnesses  and  persecutions,  or  to  comprehend 
the    spiritual   elevation   and  insight   of  its   rarest 
minds.     "It  was  art,"  said  William  Morris,  "  art 
in  which  all  men  shared,  that  made  life  romantic 
as  people  called  it  in  those  days.     That  and  not 
robber  barons,  and  inaccessible   kings,  with   their 
hierarchy  of  serving  nobles,  and   other  rubbish." 
Morris  belonged  to  a  time  which  knew  its  Middle 
Ages  better.    To  the  eighteenth  century  the  robber 
barons  and  the  "  other  rubbish  "  were  the  essence 
of  romance.     For  Percy  and  his  followers,  medi- 
sevalism   was    a    collection   of    what    actors    call 
"  properties  " — gargoyles,   and    odds  and   ends   of 
armour  and   castle  keeps    with    secret    passages, 
banners    and   gay   colours,   and    gay   shimmering 
obsolete    words.       Mistaking    what    was    on    its 
surface  at  any  rate  a  subtle  and  complex  civiliza- 
tion, for  rudeness  and  quaintness,  they  seemed  to 

14 


210  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

themselves  to  pass  back  into  a  freer  air,  where  any 
extravagance  was  possible,  and  good  breeding  and 
mere  circumspection  and  restraint  vanished  like 
the  wind. 

A  similar  longing  to  be  rid  of  the  precision  and 
order  of  everyday  life  drove  them  to  the  mountains, 
and  to  the  literature  of  Wales  and  the  Highlands, 
to  Celtic,  or  pseudo-Celtic  romance.  To  the  fashion 
of  the  time  mountains  were  still  frowning  and 
horrid  steeps  ;  in  Gray's  Journal  of  his  tour  in  the 
Lakes,  a  new  understanding  and  appreciation  of 
nature  is  only  struggling  through ;  and  when 
mountains  became  fashionable,  it  was  at  first,  and 
remained,  in  part  at  least,  till  the  time  of  Byron, 
for  those  very  theatrical  qualities  which  had  hither- 
to put  them  in  abhorrence.  Wordsworth  in  his 
Lines  written  above  Tinier n  Abbey ,  in  which  he 
sets  forth  the  succeeding  stages  of  his  mental 
development,  refers  to  this  love  of  the  mountains 
for  their  spectacular  qualities  as  the  first  step  in 
the  progress  of  his  mind  to  poetic  maturity : 

"  The  sounding  cataract 
Haunted  me  like  a  passion  ;  the  tall  rock, 
The  mountain  and  the  deep  and  gloomy  wood, 
Their  colours  and  their  forms  were  then  to  me 
An  appetite.1' 

This  same  passion  for  the  "  sounding  cataract " 
and  the  "  tall  rock,"  this  appetite  for  the  deep  and 
gloomy  wood,  gave  its  vogue  in  Wordsworth's 
boyhood  to  Macpherson's  Ossian,  a  book  which, 


THE   ROMANTIC   REVIVAL  211 

whether  it  be  completely  fraudulent  or  not,  was  of 
capital  importance  in  the  beginnings  of  the  Romantic 
movement. 

The  love   of  mediaeval  quaintness  and  obsolete 
words,  however,  led  to  a  more  important  literary 
event — the  publication  of  Bishop  Percy's  edition  of     .     / 
the   ballads   in   the   Percy  folio — the   Reliques  of     v 
Ancient  Poetry.     Percy  to  his  own  mind  knew  the 
Middle  Ages   better  than  they  knew  themselves, 
and  he  took  care  to  dress  to  advantage  the  rude- 
ness  and   plainness  of  his  originals.     Perhaps  we 
should  not  blame  him.     Sir  Walter  Scott  did  the 
same  with   better  tact   and   skill   in    his    Border 
minstrelsy,   and   how  many  distinguished  editors 
are  there  who  have  tamed  and  smoothed  down  the 
natural  wildness  and  irregularity  of  Blake?     But 
it  is  more  important  to  observe  that  when  Percy's 
reliques  came  to  have  their  influence  on   writing 
his  additions  were  imitated  as  much  as  the  poems 
on  which  he  grafted  them.     Chatterton's  Rowley 
Poems,  which  in  many  places  seem  almost  incon- 
ceivably banal  and  artificial  to  us  to-day,  caught 
their  accent  from  the  episcopal  editor  as  much  as 
from  the  ballads  themselves.     None  the  less,  what- 
ever its  fault,  Percy's  collection  gave  its  impetus 
to  one  half  of  the  Romantic  movement;   it  was 
eagerly  read  in  Germany,   and  when  it  came  to 
influence   Scott  and  Coleridge  it  did  so  not  only 
directly  but  through  Burger's  imitation   of  it ;   it 
began  the  modern  study  and  love   of  the   ballad 


\l 


212  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

which  has  given  us  Sister  Helen,  the  White  Ship, 
and  the  Lady  of  Shalott. 

But  the  Romantic  revival  goes  deeper  than  any 
change,  however  momentous,  of  fashion  or  style. 
It  meant  certain  fundamental  changes  in  human 
outlook.  In  the  first  place,  one  notices  in  the 
authors  of  the  time  an  extraordinary  development 
of  imaginative  sensibility  ;  the  mind  at  its  countless 
points  of  contact  with  the  sensuous  world  and  the 
world  of  thought  seems  to  become  more  alive  and 
alert.  It  is  more  sensitive  to  fine  impressions,  to 
finely  graded  shades  of  difference.  Outward  objects 
and  philosophical  ideas  seem  to  increase  in  their 
content  and  their  meaning,  and  acquire  a  new 
power  to  enrich  the  intensest  life  of  the  human 
spirit.  Mountains  and  lakes,  the  dignity  of  the 
peasant,  the  terror  of  the  supernatural,  scenes  of 
history,  mediaeval  architecture  and  armour,  and 
mediaeval  thought  and  poetry,  the  arts  and  mytho- 
logy of  Greece — all  became  springs  of  poetic  in- 
spiration and  poetic  joy.  The  impressions  of  all 
these  things  were  unfamiliar  and  ministered  to  a 
sense  of  wonder,  and  by  that  very  fact  they  were 
classed  as  Romantic,  as  modes  of  escape  from  a 
settled  way  of  life.  But  they  were  also  in  a  sense 
familiar  too.  The  mountains  made  their  appeal  to 
a  deep  implanted  feeling  in  man,  to  his  native  sense 
of  his  own  worth  and  dignity  and  splendour  as  a 
part  of  nature,  and  his  recognition  of  natural  scenery 
as  necessary,  and  in  its  fullest  meaning  as  sufficient, 


THE   ROMANTIC   REVIVAL  213 

for  his  spiritual  needs.  They  called  him  back  from 
the  artificiality  and  complexity  of  the  cities  he  had 
built  for  himself,  and  the  society  he  had  weaved 
round  him,  to  the  natural  world  in  which  Providence 
had  planted  him  of  old,  and  which  was  full  of  signi- 
ficance for  his  soul.  The  greatest  poets  of  the 
Romantic  revival  strove  to  capture  and  convey  the 
/influence  of  nature  on  the  mind  and  of  the  mind 
on  nature,  interpenetrating  one  another.  They 
were  none  the  less  artists  because  they  approached 
nature  in  a  state  of  passive  receptivity.  /  They 
believed  in  the  autocracy  of  the  individual  imagina- 
tion none  the  less  because  their  mission  was  to 
divine  nature  and  to  understand  her,  rather  than  to 
correct  her  profusions  in  the  name  of  art. 

In  the  second  place  the  Romantic  revival  meant  I  / 
a  development  of  the  historical  sense.  Thinkers 
like  Burke  and  Montesquieu  helped  students  of 
politics  to  acquire  perspective  ;  to  conceive  modern 
institutions  not  as  things  separate,  and  separately 
created,  but  as  conditioned  by,  and  evolved  from, 
the  institutions  of  an  earlier  day.  Even  the  revolu- 
tionary spirit  of  the  time  looked  both  before  and 
after,  and  took  history  as  well  as  the  human 
perfectibility  imagined  by  philosophers  into  its 
purview.  In  France  the  reformers  appealed  in  the 
first  instance  for  a  States  General — a  mediaeval 
institution — as  the  corrective  of  their  wrongs,  and 
later  when  they  could  not,  like  their  neighbours  in 
Belgium,  demand  reform  by  way  of  the  restoration 


214  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  their  historical  rights,  they  were  driven  to  go  a 
step  further  back  still  beyond  history,  to  what  they 
conceived  to  be  primitive  society,  and  demand  the 
rights  of  man.  This  development  of  the  historical 
sense,  which  had  such  a  widespread  influence  on 
politics,  got  itself  into  literature  in  the  creation  of 
the  historical  novel.  Scott  and  Chateaubriand 
revived  the  old  romance  in  which,  by  a  peculiar 
ingenuity  of  form,  the  adventures  of  a  typical  hero 
of  fiction  are  cast  in  a  historical  setting  and  set 
about  with  portraits  of  real  personages.  The 
historical  sense  affected,  too,  novels  dealing  with 
contemporary  life.  Scott's  best  work,  his  novels 
of  Scottish  character,  catch  more  than  half  their 
excellence  from  the  richness  of  colour  and  pro- 
portion which  the  portraiture  of  the  living  people 
acquires  when  it  is  aided  by  historical  knowledge 
and  imagination. 

Lastly,  besides  this  awakened  historical  sense, 
and  this  quickening  of  imaginative  sensibility  to 
the  message  of  nature,  the  Romantic  revival 
brought  to  literature  a  revival  of  the  sense  of 
the  connection  between  the  visible  world  and 
another  world  which  is  unseen.  The  supernatural 
which  in  all  but  the  crudest  of  mechanisms  had 
been  out  of  English  literature  since  Macbeth, 
took  hold  on  the  imaginations  of  authors,  and 
brought  with  it  a  new  subtlety  and  a  new  and 
nameless  horror  and  fascination.  There  is  nothing 
in  earlier  English  literature  to  set  beside  the  strange, 


THE   ROMANTIC   REVIVAL  215 

and  terrible  indefiniteness  of  the  Ancient  Mariner, 
and  though  much  in  this  kind  has  been  written 
since,  we  have  not  got  far  beyond  the  skill  and 
imagination  with  which  Coleridge  and  Scott  worked 
on  the  instinctive  fears  that  lie  buried  in  the  human 
mind. 

Of  all  these  aspects  of  the  revival,  however,  the 
new  sensitiveness  and  accessibility  to  the  influences 
of  external  nature  was  the  most  pervasive  and  the 
most  important.  Wordsworth  speaks  for  the  love 
that  is  in  homes  where  poor  men  lie,  the  daily 
teaching  that  is  in 

"  Woods  and  rills ; 
The  silence  that  is  in  the  starry  sky, 
The  peace  that  is  among  the  lonely  hills." 

Shelley  for  the  wildness  of  the  west  wind,  and  the 
ubiquitous  spiritual  emotion  which  speaks  equally 
in  the  song  of  a  skylark  or  in  a  political  revolution. 
Byron  for  the  swing  and  roar  of  the  sea  and  the 
grandeur  of  savage  landscape.  Keats  for  verdurous 
glooms  and  winding  mossy  ways.  Scott  and 
Coleridge,  though  like  Byron  they  are  less  with 
nature  than  with  romance,  share  the  same  com- 
munion. 

This  imaginative  sensibility  of  the  Romantics  not 
only  deepened  their  communion  with  nature,  it 
brought  them  into  a  truer  relation  with  what  had 
before  been  created  in  literature  and  art.  The 
Romantic  revival  is  the  Golden  Age  of  English 
criticism ;  all  the  poets  were  critics  of  one  sort  or 


216  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

another — either  formally  in  essays  and  prefaces,  or 
in  passing  and  desultory  flashes  of  illumination  in 
their  correspondence.     Wordsworth,  in  his  prefaces, 
in  his  letter  to  a  friend  of  Burns  which  contains 
such  a  breadth  and   clarity   of  wisdom  on  things 
that  seem  alien  to  his  sympathies,  even  in  some  of 
his  poems  ;  Coleridge,  in  his  Biographia  Literaria, 
in  his  notes  on  Shakespeare,  in  those  rhapsodies  at 
Highgate  which  were  the  basis   for  his   recorded 
table  talk ;    Keats   in   his   letters ;   Shelley  in  his 
Defence    of   Poetry ;    Byron    in    his    satires    and 
journals  ;.  Scott  in  those  lives  of  the  novelists  which 
contain  so  much  truth  and  insight  into  the  works 
of  fellow  craftsmen — they  are  all  to  be  found  turn- 
ing the  new  acuteness  of  impression  which  was  in 
the  air  they  breathed,  to  the  study  of  literature,  as 
well  as  to  the  study  of  nature.     Alongside  of  them 
were  two  authors,  Lamb  and  Hazlitt,  whose  bent 
was  rather  critical  than  creative,  and  the  best  part 
of  whose  intelligence  and  sympathy  was  spent  on 
the  sensitive  and  loving  divination  of  our  earlier 
literature.     With  these  two  men  began  the  criticism 
of  acting  and  of  pictorial  art  that  have  developed 
since  into  two  of  the  main  kinds  of  modern  critical 
writing. 

Romantic  criticism,  both  in  its  end  and  its 
method,  differs  widely  from  that  of  Dr  Johnson 
and  his  school.  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  were 
concerned  with  deep-seated  qualities  and  tempera- 
mental differences.  Their  critical  work  revolved 


THE   ROMANTIC   REVIVAL  217 

S 
round    their    conception    of   the    fancy   and    the 

imagination,  the  one  dealing  with  nature  on  the 
surface  and  decorating  it  with  imagery,  the  other 
penetrating  to  its  deeper  significances.  Hazlitt 
and  Lamb  applied  their  analogous  conception  of 
wit  as  a  lower  quality  than  humour,  in  the  same 
fashion.  Dr  Johnson  looked  on  the  other  hand 

_for  correctness  of  form,  for  the  subordination  of 
the  parts  to  the  whole,  for  the  self-restraint  and 
common  sense  which  good  manners  would  demand 
in  society,  and  for  wisdom  in  practical  life.  His 
school  cared  more  for  large  general  ont.lines  than  for 
tririjijn^detail.  They  would  not  permit  the  idio- 
syncrasy of  a  personal  or  individual  point  of  view  : 
hence  they  were  incapable  of  understanding  lyricism, 
and  they  preferred  those  forms  of  writing  which 
set  themselves  to  express  the  ideas  and  feelings  that 
most  men  may  be  supposed  to  have  in  common. 
Dr  Johnson  thought  a  bombastic  and  rhetorical 
passage  in  Congreve's  Mourning  Bride  better  than 
the  famous  description  of  Dover  cliff  in  King  Lear. 
"  The  crows,  sir,"  he  said  of  the  latter,  "  impede 
your  fall."  Their  town  breeding,  and  possibly,  as 
we  saw  in  the  case  of  Dr  Johnson,  an  actual 
physical  disability,  made  them  distrust  any  clear 

jand  sympathetic  rendering  of  the  sense  impressions 
which  nature  creates.  One  cannot  imagine  Dr 
Johnson  caring  much  for  the  minute  observations 
of  Tennyson's  nature  poems,  or  delighting  in  the 
verdurous  and  mossy  alleys  of  Keats.  His  test  in 


218  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

such  a  case  would  be  simple ;  he  would  not  have 
liked  to  have  been  in  such  places,  nor,  reluctantly 
compelled  to  go  there,  would  he  in  all  likelihood 
have  had  much  to  say  about  them  beyond  that  they 
were  damp.  For  the  poetry — such  as  Shelley's— 
which  worked  by  means  of  impalpable  and  indefinite 
suggestion,  he  would,  one  may  conceive,  have  cared 
even  less.  The  famous  "This  will  never  do"  of 
Jeffrey's  writing  on  Wordsworth's  Excursion  in 
the  Edinburgh  Review  was  the  last  word  of  the 
Johnsonian  school.  New  modes  of  poetry  asked  of 
critics  new  sympathies  and  a  new  way  of  approach. 
But  it  is  time  to  turn  to  the  authors  themselves. 


(2) 

The  case  of  Wordsworth  is  peculiar.  In  his  own 
day  he  was  vilified  and  misunderstood ;  poets  like 
Byron,  whom  most  of  us  would  now  regard  simply 
as  depending  from  the  school  he  created,  sneered 
at  him.  Shelley  and  Keats  failed  to  understand 
him  or  his  motives  ;  he  was  suspected  of  apostasy, 
and  when  he  became  poet  laureate  he  was  written 
off  as  a  turncoat  who  had  played  false  to  the 
ideals  of  his  youth.  Now  common  opinion  regards 
him  as  a  poet  above  all  the  others  of  his  age,  and 
amongst  all  the  English  poets  standing  beside 
Milton,  but  a  step  below  Shakespeare  himself — and 
we  know  more  about  him,  more  about  the  processes 
by  which  his  soul  moved  from  doubts  to  certainties, 


THE   ROMANTIC   REVIVAL  219 

from  troubles  to  triumph,  than  we  do  about 
any  other  author  in  our  tongue.  This  knowledge 
we  have  from  the  poem  called  the  Prelude,  which 
was  published  after  his  death.  It  was  designed  to 
be  only  the  opening  and  explanatory  section  of  a 
philosophical  poem,  which  was  never  completed. 
Had  it  been  published  earlier  it  would  have  saved 
Wordsworth  from  the  coldness  and  neglect  he 
suffered  at  the  hands  of  younger  men  like  Shelley ; 
it  might  even  have  made  their  work  different  from 
what  it  is.  It  has  made  Wordsworth  very  clear 
to  us  now. 

Wordsworth  is  that  rarest  thing  amongst  poets, 
a  complete  innovator.  He  looked  at  things  in  a 
new  way.  He  found  his  subjects  in  new  places ; 
and  he  put  them  into  a  new  poetic  form.  At  the 
turning  point  of  his  life,  in  his  early  manhood,  he 
made  one  great  discovery,  had  one  great  vision. 
By  the  light  of  that  vision  and  to  communicate 
that  discovery  he  wrote  his  greatest  work.  By  and 
by  the  vision  faded,  the  world  fell  back  into  the 
light  of  common  day,  his  philosophy  passed  from 
discovery  to  acceptance,  and  all  unknown  to  him 
his  pen  fell  into  a  common  way  of  writing.  The 
faculty  of  reading  which  has  added  fuel  to  the  fire 
of  so  many  waning  inspirations  was  denied  him. 
He  was  much  too  self-centred  to  lose  himself  in 
the  works  of  others.  Only  the  shock  of  a  change 
of  environment — a  tour  in  Scotland,  or  abroad — 
shook  him  into  his  old  thrill  of  imagination,  so  that 


220  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

a  few  fine  things  fitfully  illumine  the  enormous 
and  dreary  bulk  of  his  later  work.  If  we  lost  all 
but  the  Lyrical  Ballads,  the  poems  of  1804,  and 
the  Prelude,  and  the  Excursion,  Wordsworth's 
position  as  a  poet  would  be  no  lower  than  it  is 
now,  and  he  would  be  more  readily  accepted  by 
those  who  still  find  themselves  uncertain  about 
him. 

The  determining  factor  in  his  career  was  the 
French  Revolution — that  great  movement  which, 
/besides  remaking  France  and  Europe,  made  our 
very  modes  of  thinking  anew.  While  an  under- 
graduate in  Cambridge,  Wordsworth  made  several 
vacation  visits  to  France.  The  first  peaceful  phase 
of  the  Revolution  was  at  its  height ;  France  and 
the  assembly  were  dominated  by  the  little  group 
of  revolutionary  orators  who  took  their  name  from 
the  south-western  province  from  which  most  of 
them  came,  and  with  this  group — the  Girondists 
— Wordsworth  threw  in  his  lot.  Had  he  remained 
he  would  probably  have  gone  with  them  to  the 
guillotine.  As  it  was,  the  commands  of  his 
guardian  brought  him  back  to  England,  and  he 
was  forced  to  contemplate  from  a  distance  the 
struggle  in  which  he  burned  to  take  an  active  part. 
One  is  accustomed  to  think  of  Wordsworth  as  a 
mild  old  man,  but  such  a  picture,  if  it  is  thrown 
back  as  a  presentment  of  the  Wordsworth  of  the 
'nineties,  is  a  far  way  from  the  truth.  This  darkly 
passionate  man  tortured  himself  with  his  longings 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH. 

Reproduced  by  the  permission  of  the  Master  and  Fellows  of  St  John's  College,  Cambridge. 


THE   ROMANTIC  REVIVAL 

and  his  horror.  War  came,  and  the  prayers  for 
victory  in  churches  found  him  in  his  heart  praying 
for  defeat ;  then  came  the  execution  of  the  king  ; 
then  the  plot  which  slew  the  Gironde.  Before  all 
this  Wordsworth  trembled  as  Hamlet  did  when  he 
learned  the  ghost's  story.  His  faith  in  the  world 
was  shaken.  First  his  own  country  had  taken  up 
arms  against  what  he  believed  to  be  the  cause  of 
liberty.  Then  faction  had  destroyed  his  friends 
whom  he  believed  to  be  its  standard-bearers. 
What  was  in  the  world,  in  religion,  in  morality, 
that  such  things  could  be  ?  In  the  face  of  this 
tremendous  problem,  Wordsworth,  unlike  Hamlet, 
was  resolute  and  determined.  It  was,  perhaps, 
characteristic  of  him  that  in  his  desire  to  get  his 
feet  on  firm  rock  again  he  fled  for  a  time  to  the 
exactest  of  sciences — to  mathematics.  But  though 
he  got  certainties  there,  they  must  have  been, 
one  judges,  certainties  too  arid  for  his  thirsting 
mind.  Then  he  made  his  great  discovery — helped 
to  it,  perhaps,  by  his  sister  Dorothy  and  his 
friend  Coleridge — he  found  nature,  and  in  nature, 
t  peace. 

Not  a  very  wonderful  discovery,  you  will  say ; 
but  though  the  cleansing  and  healing  force  of  \f 
natural  surroundings  on  the  mind  is  a  familiar 
enough  idea  in  our  own  day,  that  is  only  because 
Wordsworth  found  it.  When  he  gave  his  message 
to  the  world  it  was  a  new  message.  It  is  worth 
while  remembering  that  it  is  still  an  unaccepted 


• 


222  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

one.      Most   of  his   critics   still   consider   it   only 
Wordsworth's  fun  when  he  wrote : 

"  One  impulse  from  the  vernal  wood 

Can  teach  us  more  of  man, 
Of  moral  evil  and  of  good, 
Than  all  the  sages  can." 

Yet  Wordsworth  really  believed  that  moral 
lessons  and  ideas  were  to  be  gathered  from  trees 
and  stones.  It  was  the  main  part  of  his  teaching. 
He  believed  that  his  own  morality  had  been  so 
furnished  him,  and  he  wrote  his  poetry  to  convince 
other  people  that  what  had  been  true  for  him  could 
be  true  for  them  too. 

For  him  life  was  a  series  of  impressions,  and  the 
poet's  duty  was  to  recapture^  those  impressions, 
isolate  them  and  brood  over  them,  till  gradually  as 
a  result  of  his  contemplation  emotion  stirred  again 
— an  emotion  akin  to  the  authentic  thrill  that  had 
excited  him  when  the  impression  was  first  born  in 
experience.  Then  poetry  is  made ;  this  emotion 
"recollected,"  as  Wordsworth  said  (we  may  add, 
recreated),  "  in  tranquillity,"  passes  into  enduring 
verse.  He  treasured  numberless  experiences  of 
this  kind  in  his  own  life.  Some  of  them  are  set 
forth  in  the  Prelude — that  for  instance  on  which 
the  poem,  The  Thorn,  in  the  Lyrical  Ballads  is 
based ;  they  were  one  or  other  of  them  the  occasion 
of  most  of  his  poems ;  the  best  of  them  produced 
his  finest  work — such  a  poem,  for  instance,  as 
Resolution  and  Independence  or  Gipsies,  where 


THE   ROMANTIC   REVIVAL 

some  chance  sight  met  with  in  one  of  the  poet's 
walks  is  brooded  over  till  it  becomes  charged  with 
a  tremendous  significance  for  him  and  for  all  the 
world.  If  we  ask  how  he  differentiated  the  ex- 
periences which  had  most  value  for  him,  we  shall 
find  something  deficient.  That  is  to  say,  things 
which  were  unique  and  precious  to  him  do  not 
always  appear  so  to  his  readers.  He  counted  as 
gold  much  that  we  regard  as  dross.  But  though 
we  may  differ  from  his  judgments,  the  test  which 
he  applied  to  his  recollected  impressions  is  clear. 
He  attached  most  value  to  those  which  brought 
with  them  the  sense  of  an  indwelling. ^spirit,  trans-  ^ 
fusing  and  interpenetrating  all  nature,  transfiguring 
with  its  radiance  rocks  and  fields  and  trees  and 
the  men  and  women  who  lived  close  enough  to 
them  to  partake  of  their  strength — the  sense,  as 
he  calls  it  in  his  Lines  above  Tintern  Abbey,  of 
something  "  more  deeply  interfused  "  by  which  all 
nature  is  made  one.  Sometimes,  as  in  the  hymn  to 
Duty,  it  is  conceived  as  law.  Duty,  before  whom 
the  flowers  laugh,  is  the  daughter  of  the  voice  of 
God,  through  whom  the  most  ancient  heavens  are 
fresh  and  strong.  But  in  most  of  his  poems  its 
ends  do  not  trouble ;  it  is  omnipresent ;  it  pene- 
trates everything  and  transfigures  everything ;  it 
is  God.  It  was  Wordsworth's  belief  that  the  y 
perception  of  this  indwelling  spirit  weakened  as 
age  grew.  For  a  few  precious  and  glorious  years 
he  had  the  vision. 


\J 


224  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

"  When  meadow,  grove,  and  stream, 
The  earth,  and  every  common  sight 

To  me  did  seem 
Apparelled  in  celestial  light, 

The  glory  and  the  freshness  of  a  dream." 

Then  as  childhood,  when  "these  intimations  of 
immortality,"  this  perception  of  the  infinite,  are 
most  strong,  passed  further  and  further  away,  the 
vision  faded  and  he  was  left  gazing  in  the  light 
of  common  day.  He  had  his  memories  and  that 
was  all. 

There  is,  of  course,  more  in  the  matter  than 
this,  and  Wordsworth's  beliefs  were  inextricably 
entangled  with  the  conception  which  Coleridge 
borrowed  from  German  philosophy. 

"  We  receive  but  what  we  give," 

wrote  Coleridge  to  his  friend, 

"  And  in  our  life  alone  doth  Nature  live." 

And  Wordsworth  came  to  know  that  the  light 
he  had  imagined  to  be  bestowed,  was  a  light 
reflected  from  his  own  mind.  It  is  easy  to  pass 
from  criticism  to  metaphysics  where  Coleridge 
leads,  and  wise  not  to  follow. 

If  Wordsworth  represents  that  side  of  the 
Romantic  revival  which  is  best  described  as  the 
return  to  nature,  Coleridge  has  justification  for 
the  phrase  "  Renascence  of  Wonder."  He  revived 
the  supernatural  as  a  literary  force,  emancipated  it 
from  the  crude  mechanism  which  had  been  applied 


THE   ROMANTIC  REVIVAL  225 

to  it  by  dilettantes  like  Horace  Walpole  and  Mrs 
Radcliffe,  and  invested  it  instead  with  that  air 
of  suggestion  and  indefmiteness  which  gives  the 
highest  potency  to  it  in  its  effect  on  the  imagina- 
tion. But  Coleridge  is  more  noteworthy  for  what 
he  suggested  to  others  than  for  what  he  did  in 
himself.  His  poetry  is,  even  more  than  Words- 
worth's, unequal ;  he  is  capable  of  large  tracts  of 
dreariness  and  flatness  ;  he  seldom  finished  what 
he  began.  The  Ancient  Mariner,  indeed,  which 
was  the  fruit  of  his  close  companionship  with 
Wordsworth,  is  the  only  completed  thing  of  the 
highest  quality  in  the  whole  of  his  work.  Christabel 
is  a  splendid  fragment ;  for  years  the  first  part  lay 
uncompleted,  and  when  the  odd  accident  of  an 
evening's  intoxication  led  him  to  commence  the 
second,  the  inspiration  had  fled.  For  the  second 
part,  by  giving  to  the  fairy  atmosphere  of  the  first 
a  local  habitation  and  a  name,  robbed  it  of  its  most 
precious  quality;  what  it  gave  in  exchange  was 
something  the  public  could  get  better  from  Scott. 
Kubla  Khan  went  unfinished  because  the  call  of  a 
friend  broke  the  thread  of  the  reverie  in  which  it 
was  composed.  In  the  end  came  opium  and 
oceans  of  talk  at  Highgate  and  fouled  the  springs 
of  poetry.  Coleridge  never  fulfilled  the  promise 
of  his  early  days  with  Wordsworth.  "  He  never 
spoke  out."  But  it  is  on  the  lines  laid  down  by 
his  share  in  the  pioneer  work  rather  than  on  the 

lines  of  Wordsworth's  that  the  second  generation 

15 


226  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

of  Romantic  poets — that  of  Shelley  and  Keats- 
developed. 

The  work  of  Wordsworth  was  conditioned  by 
the  French  Revolution  but  it  hardly  embodied  the 
revolutionary  spirit.  What  he  conceived  to  be  its 
excesses  revolted  him,  and  though  he  sought  and 
sang  freedom,  he  found  it  rather  in  the  later  revolt 
of  the  nationalities  against  the  Revolution  as 
manifested  in  Napoleon  himself.  The  spirit  of  the 
Revolution,  as  it  was  understood  in  France  and  in 
Europe,  had  to  wait  for  Shelley  for  its  complete 
expression.  Freedom  is  the  breath  of  his  work — 
freedom  not  only  from  the  tyranny  of  earthly 
powers,  but  from  the  tyranny  of  religion,  expressing 
itself  in  republicanism,  in  atheisna^and  in  complete 
emancipation  from  the  current  moral  code  both  in 
conduct  and  in  writing.  The  reaction  which  had 
followed  the  overthrow  of  Napoleon  at  Waterloo 
sent  a  wave  of  absolutism  and  repression  all  over 
Europe.  Italy  returned  under  the  heel  of  Austria; 
the  Bourbons  were  restored  in  France;  in  England 
came  the  days  of  Castlereagh  and  Peterloo.  The 
poetry  of  Shelley  is  the  expression  of  what  the 
children  of  the  Revolution — men  and  women  who 
were  brought  up  in  and  believed  the  revolutionary 
gospel — thought  about  These  things. 

But  it  is  more  than  that_  Of  no  poet  in  English, 
nor  perhaps  in  any  other  tongue,  could  it  be  said 
with  more  surety  that  the  pursuit  of  the  spirit  of 
beauty  dominates  all  his  work.  For  Shelley  it 


THE   ROMANTIC   REVIVAL  227 

interfused  all  nature,  andjbojjossess  it  was  the  goal 
of  all  endeavour.  The  visible  world  and  the  world 
of  thought  mingle  themselves  inextricably  in  his 
contemplation  of  it  For  him  there  is  no  boundary- 
line  between  the  two,  thejme  is  as  real  and  actual 
as  the  other.  In  his  Jrandsjthat  old  trick  of  the 
poets,  the  simile,  takes_on_a_jiew  and  surprising 
form.  He  does  not  enforce  the  creations  of  his 
imagination  by  the  analogy  of  natural  appearances ; 
his  instinct  is  just  jtHe_opposite — to  describe  and 
illumine  nature  by  a  reference  to  the  creatures 
of  thought.  Other  poets,  Keats  for  instance,  or 
Tennyson,  or  the  older  poets  like  Dante  and  Homer, 
might  compare  ghosts  flying  from  an  enchanter 
to  leaves  flying  before  Jhe_  wind.  They  might 
describe  a  poet  wrapped  upjn  his  dreams  as  being 
like  a  bird  singing  invisibleJft  the  brightness  of  the 
sky.  But  Shelley  can  write  of  the  west  wind  as 

"  Before  whose  unseen  presence  the  leaves,  dead, 

Are  driven  like  ghosts  from  an  enchanter  fleeing," 

and  he  can  describe  a  skylark  in  the  heavens  as 

"Like  a  poet  hidden 

In  the  light  of  thought." 

Of  all  English  poets  he  is  the  most  completely 
lyrical.     Nothing  that  he  wrote  but  is  wrought  out  ^ 
of  the  anguish  or  joy  of  his  own  heart. 

"  Most  wretched  souls," 
he  writes 

"  Are  cradled  into  poetry  by  wrong, 
They  learn  in  suffering  what  they  teach  in  song." 


228  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Perhaps  his  work  is  too  impalpable  and  moves  in 
an  air  too  rarefied.  It  sometimes  lacks  strength. 
It  fails  to  take  grip  enough  of  life.  Had  he  lived 
he  might  have  given  it  these  things  ;  there  are  signs 
in  his  last  poems  that  he  would  have  given  it. 
But  he  could  hardly  have  bettered  the  sheer  and 
triumphant  lyricism  of  The  Skylark,  of  some  of  his 
choruses,  and  of  the  Ode  in  Dejection,  and  of  the 
Lines  written  on  the  Eugencean  Hills. 

If  the  Romantic  sense  of  the  one-ness  of  nature 
found  its  highest  exponent  in  Shelley,  the  Romantic 
sensibility  to  outward  impressions  reached  its 
climax  in  Keats.  For  him  life  is  a  series  of  sensa- 
tions, felt  with  almost  febrile  acuteness.  Records 
of  sight  and  touch  and  smell  crowd  every  line  of 
his  work ;  the  scenery  of  a  garden  in  Hampstead 
becomes  like  a  landscape  in  the  tropics,  so  extra- 
ordinary vivid  and  detailed  is  his  apprehension 
and  enjoyment  of  what  it  has  to  give  him.  The 
luxuriance  of  his  sensations  is  matched  by  the 
luxuriance  of  his  powers  of  expression.  Adjectives, 
heavily  charged  with  messages  for  the  senses,  crowd 
every  line  of  his  work,  and  in  his  earlier  poems 
overlay  so  heavily  the  thought  they  are  meant  to 
convey  that  all  sense  of  sequence  and  structure  is 
apt  to  be  smothered  under  their  weight.  Not  that 
consecutive  thought  claims  a  place  in  his  conception 
of  his  poetry.  His  ideal  was  passive  contemplation 
rather  than  active  mental  exertion.  "  O  for  a  life 
of  sensations  rather  than  of  thoughts,"  he  exclaims 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY. 
From  a  painting  by  A .  Curran  in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery. 


THE   ROMANTIC   REVIVAL  229 

in  one  of  his  letters  ;  and  in  another,  "  It  is  more 
noble  to  sit  like  Jove  than  to  fly  like  Mercury." 
His  work  has  one  message  and  one  only,  the 
lastingness  of  beauty  and  its  supreme  truth.  It  is 
stated  in  Endymion  in  lines  that  are  worn  bare  with 
quotation.  It  is  stated  again,  at  the  height  of  his 
work,  in  his  greatest  ode : 

"  Beauty  is  truth,  truth  beauty  :  that  is  all 
We  know  on  earth  and  all  we  need  to  know." 

His  work  has  its  defects ;  he  died  at  twenty-six,  so 
it  would  be  a  miracle  if  it  were  not  so.  He  lacks 
taste  and  measure  ;  he  offends  by  an  over-luxurious- 
ness  and  sensuousness ;  he  fails  when  he  is  con- 
cerned with  flesh  and  blood ;  he  is  apt,  as  Mr 
Robert  Bridges  has  said,  "to  class  women  with 
roses  and  sweetmeats."  But  in  his  short  life  he 
attained  with  surprising  rapidity  and  completeness 
to  poetic  maturity,  and  perhaps  from  no  other  poet 
could  we  find  things  to  match  his  greatest — 
Hyperion,  Isabella,  the  Eve  of  St  Agnes,  and  the 
Odes. 

There  remains  a  poet  over  whom  opinion  is  more 
sharply  divided  than  it  is  about  any  other  writer 
in  English.  In  his  day  Lord  Byron  was  the  idol, 
not  only  of  his  countrymen,  but  of  Europe.  Of 
all  the  poets  of  the  time  he  was,  if  we  except  Scott, 
whose  vogue  he  eclipsed,  the  only  one  whose  work 
was  universally  known  and  popular.  Everybody 
read  him  ;  he  was  admired  not  only  by  the  multi- 
tude and  by  his  equals,  but  by  at  least  one  who 


230  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

was  his  superior,  the  German  poet  Goethe,  who 
did  not  hesitate  to  say  of  him  that  he  was  the 
greatest  talent  of  the  century.  Though  this  exalted 
opinion  still  persists  on  the  Continent,  hardly  any- 
one could  be  found  in  England  to  subscribe  to  it 
now.  Without  insularity,  we  may  claim  to  be 
better  judges  of  authors  in  our  own  tongue  than 
foreign  critics,  however  distinguished  and  compre- 
hending. How  then  shall  be  explained  Lord 
Byron's  instant  popularity  and  the  position  he  won? 
What  were  the  qualities  which  gave  him  the  power 
he  enjoyed  ? 

In  the  first  place,  he  appealed  by  virtue  of  his 
subject-matter — the  desultory  wanderings  of  Childe 
Harold  traversed  ground  every  mile  of  which  was 
memorable  to  men  who  had  watched  the  struggle 
which  had  been  going  on  in  Europe  with  scarcely 
a  pause  for  twenty  years.  Descriptive  journalism 
was  then  and  for  nearly  half  a  century  afterwards 
unknown,  and  the  poem  by  its  descriptiveness,  by 
its  appeal  to  the  curiosity  of  its  readers,  made  the 
same  kind  of  success  that  vividly  written  special 
correspondence  would  to-day,  the  charm  of  metre 
superadded.  'Lord  Byron  gave  his  readers  some- 
thing more,  too,  than  mere  description.  He  added 
to  it  the  charm  of  a  personality,  and  when  that 
personality  was  enforced  J>y  a  title,  when  it  pro- 
claimed its  sorrows  as^the  age's  sorrows,  endowed 
itself  with  an  air  of  symbolism  and  set  itself  up  as 
a  kind  of  scapegoat  for~ttie  nation's  sins,  its  triumph 


THE   ROMANTIC   REVIVAL  231 

was  complete.  Most  men  have  from  time  to  time 
to  resist  the  temptation  to  pose  to  themselves; 
many  do  not  even  resist  it.  For  all  those  who 
chose  to  believe  themselves  blighted  by  pessimism, 
and  for  all  the  others  who  would  have  loved  to 
believe  it,  Byron  and  his  poetry  came  as  an  echo 
of  themselves.  Shallow  called  to  shallow.  Men 
found  in  him,  as  their  sons  found  more  reputably 
in  Tennyson,  a  picture  of  what  they  conceived  to 
be  the  state  of  their  own  minds. 

But  he  was  not  altogether  a  man  of  pretence. 
He  really  and  passionately  loved  freedom  ;  no  one 
can  question  his  sincerity  in  that.  He  could  be  a 
fine  and  scathing  satirist  ;  and  though  he  was  care- 
less, he  had  great  poetic  gifts. 


The  age  of  the  Romantic  revival  was  one  of 
poetry  rather  than  of  prose  ;  it  was  in  poetry  that 
the  best  minds  of  the  time  found  their  means  of 
expression.     But  it  produced  prose  of  rare  quality 
too,  and  there  is  delightful  reading  in  the  works  of 
its  essayists  and  occasional  writers.     In  its  form  the 
periodical  essay  had  changed  little  since  it  was  first 
made  popular  by  Addison  and  Steele.     It  remained, 
primarily,  a  vehicle  for  the  expression  of  a  person- 
ality, and  it  continued  to  seek  the  interests  of  its 
readers  by  creating  or  suggesting  an  individuality 
strong  enough  to  carry  off  any  desultory  adventure 
by  the  mere  force  of  its  own  attractiveness.     Yet 


ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

there  is  all  the  difference  in  the  world  between 
Hazlitt  and  Addison,  or  Lamb  and  Steele.  The 
Taller  and  the  Spectator  leave  you  with  a  sense  of 
artifice ;  Hazlitt  and  Lamb  leave  you  with  a  grip 
of  a  real  personality — in  the  one  case  very  vigorous 
and  combative,  in  the  other  set  about  with  a  rare 
plaintiveness  and  gentleness,  but  in  both  absolutely 
sincere.  Addison  is  gay  and  witty  and  delightful, 
but  he  only  plays  at  being  human ;  Lamb's  essays 
— the  translation  into  print  of  a  heap  of  idiosyn- 
crasies and  oddities,  and  likes  and  dislikes,  and 
strange  humours — come  straight  and  lovably  from 
a  human  soul. 

The  prose  writers  of  the  Romantic  movement 
brought  back  two  things  into  writing  which  had 
/been  out  of  it  since  the  seventeenth  century.  They 
^J  brought  back  egotism  and  they  brought  back  en- 
V  thusiasm.  They  had  the  confidence  that  their  own 
tastes  and  experiences  were  enough  to  interest  their 
readers ;  they  mastered  the  gift  of  putting  them- 
selves on  paper.  But  there  is  one  wide  difference 
between  them  and  their  predecessors.  Robert 
Burton  was  an  egotist  but  he  was  an  unconscious 
one ;  the  same  is  perhaps  true,  though  much  less 
certainly,  of  Sir  Thomas  Browne.  In  Lamb  and 
Hazlitt  and  De  Quincey  egotism  was  deliberate, 
consciously  assumed,  the  result  of  a  compelling  and 
shaping  art.  If  one  reads  Lamb's  earlier  essays 
and  prose  pieces,  one  can  see  the  process  at  work- 
watch  him  consciously  imitating  Fuller,  or  Burton, 


THE  ROMANTIC  REVIVAL  233 

or  Browne,  mirroring  their  idiosyncrasies,  making 
their  quaintnesses  and  graces  his  own.  By  the 
time  he  came  to  write  the  Essays  of  Elia,  he  had 
mastered  the  personal  style  so  completely  that  his 
essays  seem  simply  the  overflow  of  talk.  They  are 
so  desultory;  they  move  from  one  subject  to 
another  so  waywardly — such  an  essay  as  a  Chapter 
on  Ears,  for  instance,  passing  with  the  easy  incon- 
sequence of  conversation  from  anatomy  through 
organ  music  to  beer  ;  when  they  quote,  as  they  do 
constantly,  it  is  incorrectly,  as  in  the  random 
reminiscences  of  talk.  Here  one  would  say  is  the 
cream  risen  to  the  surface  of  a  full  mind  and 
skimmed  at  one  taking.  How  far  all  this  is  from 
the  truth  we  know — know,  too,  how  for  months  he 
polished  and  rewrote  these  magazine  articles,  rub- 
bing away  roughnesses  and  corners,  taking  off  the 
traces  of  logical  sequences  and  argument,  till  in  the 
finished  work  of  art  he  mimicked  inconsequence  so 
perfectly  that  his  friends  might  have  been  deceived. 
And  the  personality  he  put  on  paper  was  partly  an 
artistic  creation,  too.  In  life  Lamb  was  a  nervous, 
easily  excitable  and  emotional  man  ;  his  years  were 
worn  with  the  memory  of  a  great  tragedy  and  the 
constantly  impending  fear  of  a  repetition  of  it. 
One  must  assume  him  in  his  way  to  have  been  a 
good  man  of  business — he  was  a  clerk  in  the  India 
House,  then  a  throbbing  centre  of  trade,  and  the 
largest  commercial  concern  in  England,  and  when 
he  retired  his  employers  gave  him  a  very  handsome 


234  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

pension.  In  the  early  portrait  by  Hazlitt  there  is 
a  dark  and  gleaming  look  of  fire  and  decision.  But 
you  would  never  guess  it  from  his  books.  There 
he  is  the  gentle  recluse,  dreaming  over  old  books, 
old  furniture,  old  prints,  old  plays  and  playbills ; 
living  always  in  the  past,  loving  in  the  town  secluded 
byways  like  the  Temple,  or  the  libraries  of  Oxford 
Colleges,  and  in  the  country  quiet  and  shaded  lanes, 
none  of  the  age's  enthusiasm  for  mountains  in  his 
soul.  When  he  turned  critic  it  was  not  to  discern 
and  praise  the  power  and  beauty  in  the  works  of 
his  contemporaries,  but  to  rediscover  and  interpret 
the  Elizabethan  and  Jacobean  romantic  plays. 

This  quality  of  egotism  Lamb  shares  with  other 
writers  of  the  time,  with  De  Quincey,  for  instance, 
who  left  buried  in  work  which  is  extensive  and 
unequal  much  that  lives  by  virtue  of  the  singular 
elaborateness  and  loftiness  of  the  style  which  he 
could  on  occasion  command.  For  the  revival  of 
enthusiasm  one  must  turn  to  Hazlitt,  who  brought 
his  passionate  and  combative  disposition  to  the 
service  of  criticism,  and  produced  a  series  of  studies 
remarkable  for  their  earnestness  and  their  vigour, 
and  for  the  essential  justness  which  they  display 
despite  the  prejudice  on  which  each  of  them  was 
confessedly  based. 


CHARLES  LAMB. 

From  a  painting-  by  Henry  Meyer  in  the  British  Museum. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

THE    VICTORIAN   AGE 

(1) 

HAD  it  not  been  that  with  two  exceptions  all  the 
poets  of  the  Romantic  revival  died  early,  it  might 
be  more  difficult  to  draw  a  line  between  their 
school  and  that  of  their  successors  than  it  is.  As 
it  happened,  the  only  poet  who  survived  and  wrote 
was  Wordsworth,  the  oldest  of  them  all.  For 
long  before  his  death  he  did  nothing  that  had  one 
touch  of  the  fire  and  beauty  of  his  earlier  work. 
The  respect  he  began,  after  a  lifetime  of  neglect, 
to  receive  in  the  years  immediately  before  his 
death,  was  paid  not  to  the  conservative  laureate  of 
1848,  but  to  the  revolutionary  in  art  and  politics 
of  fifty  years  before.  He  had  lived  on,  long  after 
his  work  was  done, 

"  To  hear  the  world  applaud  the  hollow  ghost 
That  blamed  the  living  man." 

All  the  others,  Keats,  Shelley,  Byron,  were  dead 
before  1830,  and  the  problem  which  might  have 
confronted  us  had  they  lived,  of  adult  work  running 
counter  to  the  tendencies  and  ideals  of  youth,  does 

235 


236  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

not  exist  for  us.  Keats  or  Shelley  might  have 
lived  as  long  as  Carlyle,  with  whom  they  were 
almost  exactly  contemporary ;  had  they  done  so, 
the  age  of  the  Romantic  revival  and  the  Victorian 
age  would  have  been  united  in  the  lives  of  authors 
who  were  working  in  both.  We  should  conceive, 
that  is,  the  whole  period  as  one,  just  as  we  conceive 
of  the  Renaissance  in  England,  from  Surrey  to 
Shirley,  as  one.  As  it  is,  we  have  accustomed 
ourselves  to  a  strongly  marked  line  of  division.  A 
man  must  be  on  either  one  side  or  the  other  ; 
Wordsworth,  though  he  wrote  on  till  1850,  is  on 
the  further  side ;  Carlyle,  though  he  was  born  in 
the  same  year  as  Keats,  on  the  hither  side.  Still 
the  accident  of  length  of  days  must  not  blind  us 
to  the  fact  that  the  Victorian  period,  though  in 
many  respects  its  ideals  and  modes  of  thinking 
differed  from  those  of  the  period  which  preceded 
it,  is  essentially  an  extension  of  the  Romantic 
revival  and  not  a  fresh  start.  The  coherent  in- 
spiration of  Romanticism  disintegrated  into  separate 
lines  of  development,  just  as  in  the  seventeenth 
century  the  single  inspiration  of  the  Renaissance 
broke  into  different  schools.  Along  these  separate 
lines  represented  by  such  men  as  Browning,  the 
Pre-Raphaelites,  Arnold,  and  Meredith,  literature 
enriched  and  elaborated  itself  into  fresh  forms. 
None  the  less,  every  author  in  each  of  these  lines 
of  literary  activity  invites  his  readers  to  understand 
his  direct  relations  to  the  Romantic  movement. 


THE   VICTORIAN  AGE  237 

Rossetti  touches  it  through  his  original,  Keats; 
Arnold  through  Goethe  and  Byron;  Browning 
first  through  Shelley  and  then  in  item  after  item 
of  his  varied  subject-matter. 

In  one  direction  the  Victorian  age  achieved  a 
salient  and  momentous  advance.  The  Romantic 
revival  had  been  interested  in  nature,  in  the  past, 
and  in  a  lesser  degree  in  art,  but  it  had  not  been 
interested  in  men  and  women.  To  Wordsworth 
the  dalesmen  of  the  Lakes  were  part  of  the  scenery 
they  moved  in  ;  he  saw  men  as  trees  walking,  and 
when  he  writes  about  them  as  in  such  great  poems 
as  Resolution  and  Independence,  the  Brothers, 
or  Michael,  it  is  as  natural  objects  he  treats  them, 
invested  with  the  lonely  remoteness  that  separates 
them  from  the  complexities  and  passions  of  life  as 
it  is  lived.  They  are  there,  you  feel,  to  teach  the 
same  lesson  as  the  landscape  teaches  in  which  they 
are  set.  The  passing  of  the  old  Cumberland 
beggar  through  villages  and  past  farmsteads  brings 
to  those  who  see  him  the  same  kind  of  consolation 
as  the  impulses  from  a  vernal  wood  that  Words- 
worth celebrated  in  his  purely  nature  poetry. 
Compare  with  Wordsworth,  Browning,  and  note 
the  fundamental  change  in  the  attitude  of  the 
poet  that  his  work  reveals.  Pippa  Passes  is  a 
poem  on  exactly  the  same  scheme  as  the  Old 
Cumberland  Beggar,  but  in  treatment  no  two 
things  could  be  further  apart.  The  intervention 
of  Pippa  is  dramatic,  and  though  her  song  is  in 


\/ 


238  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

the  same  key  as  the  wordless  message  of  Words- 
worth's beggar  she  is  a  world  apart  from  him, 
because  she  is  something  not  out  of  natural  history, 
but  out  of  life.  The  Victorian  age  extended  the 
imaginative  sensibility  which  its  predecessor  had 
brought  to  bear  on  nature  and  history,  to  the 
complexities  of  human  life.  It  searched  for  indi- 
viduality in  character,  studied  it  with  a  loving 
minuteness,  and  built  up  out  of  its  discoveries 
amongst  men  and  women  a  body  of  literature 
which  in  its  very  mode  of  conception  was  more 
closely  related  to  life,  and  thus  the  object  of  greater 
interest  and  excitement  to  its  readers,  than  any- 
thing which  had  been  written  in  the  previous 
ages.  It  is  the  direct  result  of  this  extension  of 
i  Romanticism  that  the  novel  became  the  char- 
^acteristic  means  of  literary  expression  of  the  time, 
and  that  Browning,  the  poet  who  more  than  all 
others  represents  the  essential  spirit  of  his  age, 
should  have  been,  as  it  were,  a  novelist  in  verse. 
Only  one  other  literary  form,  indeed,  could  have 
ministered  adequately  to  this  awakened  interest, 
but  by  some  luck  not  easy  to  understand  the 
drama,  which  might  have  done  with  greater 
economy  and  directness  the  work  the  novel  had 
to  do,  remained  outside  the  main  stream  of 
literary  activity.  To  the  drama  at  last  it  would 
seem  that  we  are  returning,  and  it  may  be  that 
in  the  future  the  direct  representation  of  the 
clash  of  human  life,  which  is  still  mainly  in  the 


THE   VICTORIAN   AGE  239 

hands    of    our  novelists,  may   come   back  to   its 
own  domain. 

The  Victorian  age,  then,  added  humanity  to  * 
nature  and  art  as  the  subject-matter  of  literature. 
But  it  went  further  than  that.  For  the  first  time 
since  the  Renaissance  came  an  era  which  was 
conscious  of  itself  as  an  epoch  in  the  history  of  / 
mankind,  and  confident  of  its  mission.  The 
fifteenth  and  sixteenth  centuries  revolutionized 
cosmography,  and  altered  the  face  of  the  physical 
world.  The  nineteenth  century,  by  the  discoveries 
of  its  men  of  science,  and  by  the  remarkable  and 
rapid  succession  of  inventions  which  revolutionized 
the  outward  face  of  life,  made  hardly  less  alteration 
in  accepted  ways  of  thinking.  The  evolutionary 
theory,  which  had  been  in  the  air  since  Goethe,  and 
to  which  Darwin  was  able  to  give  an  apparently 
incontrovertible  basis  of  scientific  fact,  profoundly 
influenced  man's  attitude  to  nature  and  to  religion.  *-— 
Physical  as  apart  from  natural  science  made 
scarcely  less  advance,  and  instead  of  a  world  created 
at  some  fixed  moment  of  time,  on  which  had  been 
placed  by  some  outward  agency  all  the  forms  and 
shapes  of  nature  that  we  know,  came  the  concep- 
tion of  a  planet  congealing  out  of  a  nebula,  and  of 
some  lower,  simpler,  and  primeval  form  of  life 
multiplying  and  diversifying  itself  through  succeed- 
ing stages  of  development  to  form  both  the  animal 
and  the  vegetable  world.  This  conception  not 
only  enormously  excited  and  stimulated  thought, 


240  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

but  it  gave  thinkers  a  strange  sense  of  confidence 
and  certainty  not  possessed  by  the  age  before. 
Everything  seemed  plain  to  them  ;  they  were  heirs 
of  all  the  ages.  Their  doubts  were  as  certain  as 
their  faith. 

"  There  lives  more  faith  in  honest  doubt, 
Believe  me,  than  in  half  the  creeds. " 

said  Tennyson ;  "  honest  doubt,"  hugged  with  all 
the  certainty  of  a  revelation,  is  the  creed  of  most 
of  his  philosophical  poetry,  and,  what  is  more  to  the 
point,  was  the  creed  of  the  masses  that  were  begin- 
ning to  think  for  themselves,  to  whose  awakening 
interest  his  work  so  strongly  appealed.  There 
were,  no  doubt,  literary  side-currents.  Disraeli 
survived  to  show  that  there  were  still  young  men 
who  thought  Byronically.  Rossetti  and  his  school 
held  themselves  proudly  aloof  from  the  rationalistic 
and  scientific  tendencies  of  the  time,  and  found  in 
the  Middle  Ages,  better  understood  than  they  had 
been  either  by  Coleridge  or  Scott,  a  refuge  from  a 
time  of  factories  and  fact.  The  Oxford  movement 
ministered  to  the  same  tendencies  in  religion  and 
philosophy ;  but  it  is  the  scientific  spirit,  and  all 
that  the  scientific,  spirit  implied,  its^certain  doubt, 
its  care  for  minuteness  and  truth  QJ.  observation, 
its  growing  interest  in  social  processes,  and  the 
conditions  under  which  life  is  lived,  that  is  the 
central  fact  in  Victorian  literature. 

Tennyson  represents  more  fully  than  any  other 
poet  this  essential  spirit  of  the  age.     If  it  be  true, 


THE   VICTORIAN   AGE 

as  has  been  often  asserted,  that  the  spirit  of  an  age 
is  to  be  found  best  in  the  work  of  lesser  men,  his 
complete  identity  with  the  thought  of  his  time  is 
in  itself  evidence  of  his  inferiority  to  his  con- 
temporary, Browning.  Comparisons  between  the 
two  men  seem  inevitable ;  they  were  made  by 
readers  when  In  Memoriam  and  Men  and  Women 
came  hot  from  the  press,  and  they  have  been  made 
ever  since.1  There  could,  of  course,  scarcely  be 
two  men  more  dissimilar;  Tennyson  elaborating 
and  decorating  what  is  at  bottom  something  simple 
and  plain — using  what  has  been  called  the  "  ornate  " 
style  and  founding  what  is  in  a  way  a  new  poetic 
diction  which  has  lasted  to  our  own  day ;  Brown- 
ing delving  into  the  esoteric  and  the  obscure,  and 
bringing  up  strange  and  unfamiliar  finds  ;  Tennyson 
in  faultless  verse  registering  current  newly  accepted 
ways  of  thought ;  Browning  in  advance  thinking 
afresh  for  himself,  occupied  ceaselessly  in  the  ardu- 
ous labour  of  creating  an  audience  fit  to  judge  him. 
The  age  justified  the  accuracy  with  which  Tenny- 
son mirrored  it,  by  accepting  him  and  rejecting 
Browning.  It  is  this  very  accuracy  that  almost 
forces  us  at  this  time  to  minimize  and  perhaps 
dispraise  Tennyson's  work.  We  have  passed  from 
Victorian  certainties,  and  so  he  is  apt,  when  he 

1  See,  for  instance,  Bagehot's  remarkable  and  ingenious  essay 
on  "  Wordsworth,  Tennyson,  and  Browning,  or  the  Pure,  Ornate, 
and  Grotesque  Styles  in  Poetry,"  for  which  Enoch  Arden  and 
Dramatis  Personce  were  the  text.  No  writer  of  criticism  better 
repays  the  close  attention  of  students  of  literature  than  Bagehot. 

16 


ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

writes  in  the  mood  of  Locksley  Hall  and  the  rest, 
to  appear  to  us  a  little  shallow,  a  little  empty,  and 
a  little  pretentious. 

His  earlier  poetry,  before  he  took  upon  himself 
the  burden  of  the  age,  is  his  best  work,  and  it  bears 
strongly  marked  upon  it  the  influence  of  Keats. 
Such  a  poem,  for  instance,  as  CEnone  shows  an 
extraordinarily  fine  sense  of  language  and  melody, 
and  the  capacity  caught  from  Keats  of  conveying  a 
rich  and  highly  coloured  pictorial  effect.  No  other 
poet,  save  Keats,  has  had  a  sense  of  colour  so 
highly  developed  as  Tennyson's.  From  his  boy- 
hood he  was  an  exceedingly  close  and  sympathetic 
observer  of  the  outward  forms  of  nature,  and  he 
makes  a  splendid  use  of  what  his  eyes  had  taught 
him  in  these  earlier  poems.  Later  his  interest  in 
insects  and  birds  and  flowers  outran  the  legitimate 
opportunity  he  possessed  of  using  it  in  poetry.  It 
was  his  habit,  his  son  tells  us,  to  keep  notebooks 
of  things  he  had  observed  in  his  garden  or  in  his 
walks,  and  to  work  them  up  afterwards  into  similes 
for  the  Princess  and  the  Idylls  of  the  King.  Read 
in  the  books  written  by  admirers,  in  which  they 
have  been  studied  and  collected  (there  are  several 
of  them),  these  similes  are  pleasing  enough  ;  in  the 
text  where  they  stand  they  are  apt  to  have  the  air 
of  impertinences,  beautiful  and  extravagant  im- 
pertinences no  doubt,  but  alien  to  their  setting. 
In  one  of  the  Idylls  of  the  King  the  fall  of  a 
drunken  knight  from  his  horse  is  compared  to  the 


ALFRED  LORD  TENNYSON. 
From  a  painting  by  G.  F.  Watts,  R.A. 


THE   VICTORIAN   AGE  243 

fall  of  a  jutting  edge  of  cliff  and  with  it  a  lance-like 
fir-tree,  which  Tennyson  had  observed  near  his 
home,  and  one  cannot  resist  the  feeling  that  the 
comparison  is  a  thought  too  great  for  the  thing  it 
was  meant  to  illustrate.  So,  too,  in  the  Princess 
when  he  describes  a  handwriting, 

"  In  such  a  hand  as  when  a  field  of  corn 
Bows  all  its  ears  before  the  roaring  East," 

he  is  using  up  a  sight  noted  in  his  walks  and 
transmuted  into  poetry  on  a  trivial  and  frivolous 
occasion.  You  do  not  feel,  in  fact,  that  the  hand- 
writing visualized  spontaneously  called  up  the 
comparison ;  you  are  as  good  as  certain  that  the 
simile  existed  waiting  for  use  before  the  hand- 
writing was  thought  of. 

The  accuracy  of  his  observation  of  nature,  his 
love  of  birds  and  larvae,  is  matched  by  the  careful- 
ness with  which  he  embodied,  as  soon  as  ever  they 
were  made,  the  discoveries  of  natural  and  physical 
science.  Nowadays,  possibly  because  these  things 
have  become  commonplace  to  us,  we  may  find  him 
a  little  school-boy-like  in  his  pride  of  knowledge. 
He  knows  that 

"  This  world  was  once  a  fluid  haze  of  light, 
Till  toward  the  centre  set  the  starry  tides 
And  eddying  wild  suns  that  wheeling  cast 
The  planets," 

just  as  he  knows  what  the  catkins  on  the  willows 
are  like,  or  the  names  of  the  butterflies :  but  he  is 
capable,  on  occasion,  of  "  dragging  it  in,"  as  in 


244  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

"  The  nebulous  star  we  call  the  sun, 
If  that  hypothesis  of  theirs  be  sound," 

from  the  mere  pride  in  his  familiarity  with  the  last 
new  thing.  His  dealings  with  science,  that  is,  no 
more  than  his  dealings  with  nature,  have  that 
inevitableness,  that  spontaneous  appropriateness 
that  we  feel  we  have  a  right  to  ask  from  great 
poetry. 

Had  Edgar  Allan  Poe  wanted  an  example  for 
his  theory  of  the  impossibility  of  writing,  in  modern 
times,  a  long  poem,  he  might  have  found  it  in 
Tennyson.  His  strength  is  in  his  shorter  pieces ; 
even  where  as  in  In  Memoriam  he  has  conceived 
and  written  something  at  once  extended  and 
beautiful,  the  beauty  lies  rather  in  the  separate 
parts  ;  the  thing  is  more  in  the  nature  of  a  sonnet 
sequence  than  a  continuous  poem.  Of  his  other 
larger  works,  the  Princess,  a  scarcely  happy  blend 
between  burlesque  in  the  manner  of  the  Rape  of 
the  Lock,  and  a  serious  apostleship  of  the  liberation 
of  women,  is  redeemed  by  the  lyrics  which  it 
contains.  Tennyson's  innate  conservatism  hardly 
squared  with  the  liberalizing  tendencies  he  caught 
from  the  more  advanced  thought  of  his  age,  in 
writing  it.  Something  of  the  same  kind  is  true  of 
Maud,  which  is  a  novel  told  in  dramatically 
varied  verse.  The  hero  is  morbid,  his  social  satire 
peevish,  and  a  story  which  could  have  been  com- 
pletely redeemed  by  the  ending  (the  death  of  the 
hero)  which  artistic  fitness  demands,  is  of  value 


THE   VICTORIAN   AGE  245 

for  us  now  through  its  three  amazing  songs,  in 
which  the  lyric  genius  of  Tennyson  reached  its 
finest  flower.  It  cannot  be  denied,  either,  that  he 
failed — though  magnificently — in  the  Idylls  of  the 
King.  The  odds  were  heavily  against  him  in  the 
choice  of  a  subject.  Arthur  is  at  once  too  legend- 
ary and  too  shadowy  for  an  epic  hero,  and  nothing 
but  the  treatment  that  Milton  gave  to  Satan  (i.e. 
flat  substitution  of  the  legendary  person  by  a  newly 
created  character)  could  fit  him  for  the  place. 
Even  if  Arthur  had  been  more  promising  than 
he  is,  Tennyson's  sympathies  were  fundamentally 
alien  from  the  moral  and  religious  atmosphere  of 
Arthurian  romance.  His  robust  Protestantism 
left  no  room  for  mysticism ;  he  could  neither 
appreciate  nor  render  the  mystical  fervour  and 
exaltation  which  is  in  the  old  history  of  the  Holy 
Grail.  Nor  could  he  comprehend  the  morality  of  a 
society  where  courage,  sympathy  for  the  oppressed, 
loyalty  and  courtesy  were  the  only  essential 
virtues,  and  love  took  the  way  of  freedom  and  the 
heart  rather  than  the  way  of  law.  In  his  heart 
Tennyson's  attitude  to  the  ideals  of  chivalry  and 
the  old  stories  in  which  they  are  embodied  differed 
probably  very  little  from  that  of  Roger  Ascham, 
or  of  any  other  Protestant  Englishman ;  when  he 
endeavoured  to  make  an  epic  of  them  and  to  fasten 
to  it  an  allegory  in  which  Arthur  should  typify 
the  war  of  soul  against  sense,  what  happened  was 
only  what  might  have  been  expected.  The  heroic 


246  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

enterprise  failed,  and  left  us  with  a  series  of  mid- 
^  Victorian  novels   in   verse  in  which   the  knights 
figure    as    heroes   of  the  common   mid- Victorian 
type. 

But  if  he  failed  in  his  larger  poems,  he  had  a 
genius  little  short  of  perfect  in  his  handling  of 
shorter  forms.  The  Arthurian  story  which  pro- 
duced only  middling  moralizing  in  the  Idylls,  gave 
us  as  well  the  supremely  written  Homeric  episode 
of  the  Morte  d? Arthur,  and  the  sharp  and  defined 
beauty  of  Sir  Galahad  and  the  Lady  of  Shallott. 
Tennyson  had  a  touch  of  the  pre-Raphaelite  faculty 
of  minute  painting  in  words,  and  the  writing  of 
these  poems  is  as  clear  and  naive  as  in  the  best 
things  of  Rossetti.  He  had  also  what  neither 
Rossetti  nor  any  of  his  contemporaries  in  verse, 
except  Browning,  had,  a  fine  gift  of  understanding 
"  humanity.  The  peasants  of  his  English  idylls  are 
conceived  with  as  much  breadth  of  sympathy  and 
richness  of  humour,  as  purely  and  as  surely,  as  the 
peasants  of  Chaucer  or  Burns.  A  note  of  passion- 
ate humanity  is  indeed  in  all  his  work.  It  makes 
vivid  and  intense  his  scholarly  handling  of  Greek 
N  myth ;  always  the  unchanging  human  aspect  of  it 
attracts  him  most,  in  (Enone's  grief,  in  the  in- 
domitableness  of  Ulysses,  in  the  weariness  and  dis- 
illusionment in  Tithonus.  It  has  been  the  cause 
of  the  comfort  he  has  brought  to  sorrow;  none 
of  his  generation  takes  such  a  human  attitude 
to  death.  Shelley  could  yearn  for  the  infinite, 


THE  VICTORIAN  AGE  247 

Browning  treat  it  as  the  last  and  greatest  ad- 
venture, Arnold  meet  it  clear-eyed  and  resigned. 
To  Wordsworth  it  is  the  mere  return  of  man  the 
transient  to  Nature  the  eternal. 

"  No  motion  has  she  now  ;  no  force, 

She  neither  hears  nor  sees, 
Rolled  round  in  earth's  diurnal  course 
With  rocks,  and  stones,  and  trees." 

To  Tennyson  it  brings  the  fundamental  human 
home-sickness  for  familiar  things. 

"  Ah,  sad  and  strange  as  in  dark  summer  dawns 
The  earliest  pipe  of  half-awakened  birds 
To  dying  ears,  when  unto  dying  eyes 
The  casement  slowly  grows  a  glimmering  square." 

It  is  an  accent  which  wakes  an  echo  in  a  thousand 
hearts. 

(2) 

While  Tennyson,  in  his  own  special  way  and,  so 
to  speak,  in  collaboration  with  the  spirit  of  the  age, 
was  carrying  on  the  work  of  Romanticism  on  its 
normal  lines,  Browning  was  finding  a  new  style 
and  a  new  subject-matter.  In  his  youth  he  had 
begun  as  an  imitator  of  Shelley,  and  Pauline  and 
Paracelsus  remain  to  show  what  the  influence  of 
the  "  sun-treader  "  was  on  his  poetry.  But  as  early 
as  his  second  publication,  Bells  and  Pomegranates, 
he  had  begun  to  speak  for  himself,  and  with  Men 
and  Women,  a  series  of  poems  of  amazing  variety 
and  brilliance,  he  placed  himself  unassailably  in  the 
first  rank.  Like  Tennyson's,  his  genius  continued 


248  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

high  and  undimmed  while  life  was  left  him.  Men 
and  Women  was  followed  by  an  extraordinary 
narrative  poem,  The  Ring  and  the  Book,  and  it 
by  several  volumes  of  scarcely  less  brilliance,  the 
last  of  which  appeared  on  the  very  day  of  his 
death. 

Of  the  two  classes  into  which,  as  we  saw  when 
we  were  studying  Burns,  creative  artists  can  be 
divided,  Browning  belongs  to  that  one  which  makes 
everything  new  for  itself,  and  has  in  consequence 
to  educate  the  readers  by  whom  its  work  can  alone 
be  judged.  He  was  an  innovator  in  nearly  every- 
thing he  did  ;  he  thought  for  himself ;  he  wrote  for 
himself,  and  in  his  own  way.  And  because  he 
refused  to  follow  ordinary  modes  of  writing,  he 
was  and  is  still  widely  credited  with  being  tortured 
and  obscure.1  The  charge  of  obscurity  is  unfor- 
tunate because  it  tends  to  shut  off  from  him  a  large 
class  of  readers  for  whom  he  has  a  sane  and  special 
and  splendid  message. 

His  most  important  innovation  in  form  was  his 
device  of  the  dramatic  lyric.  What  interested  him 

1  The  deeper  causes  of  Browning's  obscurity  have  been  detailed 
in  Chapter  IV.  of  this  book.  It  may  be  added  for  the  benefit  of 
the  reader  who  fights  shy  on  the  report  of  it,  that  in  nine  cases 
out  of  ten  it  arises  simply  from  his  colloquial  method  ;  we  go  to 
him  expecting  the  smoothness  and  completeness  of  Tennyson ; 
we  find  in  him  the  irregularities,  the  suppressions,  the  quick 
changes  of  talk — the  clipped,  clever  talk  of  much-idea'd  people 
who  hurry  breathlessly  from  one  aspect  to  another  of  a  subject 
— an  obscurity  similar  to  that  of  Shakespeare  in  his  later  plays, 
particularly  The  Tempest  and  the  Winters  Tale, 


THE   VICTORIAN   AGE  249 

in  life  was  men  and  women,  and  in  them,  not  their 
actions,  but  the  motives  which  governed  their 
actions.  To  lay  bare  fully  the  working  of  motive 
in  a  narrative  form  with  himself  as  narrator  was 
obviously  impossible ;  the  strict  dramatic  form, 
though  he  attained  some  success  in  it,  does  not  seem 
to  have  attracted  him,  probably  because  in  it  the 
ultimate  stress  must  be  on  the  thing  done  rather 
than  the  thing  thought ;  there  remained,  therefore, 
of  the  ancient  forms  of  poetry,  the  lyric.  The 
lyric  had  of  course  been  used  before  to  express 
emotions  imagined  and  not  real  to  the  poet  himself ; 
the  Elizabethans  and  their  successors,  Donne  and 
his  school,  in  the  seventeenth  century  had  so  used 
it ;  Browning  was  the  first  to  project  it  to  express 
imagined  emotions  of  men  and  women,  whether 
typical  or  individual,  whom  he  himself  had  created. 
Alongside  this  perversion  of  the  lyric,  he  created  a 
looser  and  freer  form,  the  dramatic  monologue,  in 
which  most  of  his  most  famous  poems,  Cleon, 
Sludge  the  Medium,  Bishop  Blougrams  Apology, 
etc.,  are  cast.  In  the  convention  which  Browning 
established,  all  kinds  of  people  are  endowed  with 
a  miraculous  articulation,  a  new  gift  of  tongues ; 
they  explain  themselves,  their  motives,  the  springs 
of  those  motives  (for  in  Browning's  view  every 
thought  and  act  of  a  man's  life  is  part  of  an  inter- 
dependent whole),  and  their  author's  peculiar  and 
robust  philosophy  of  life.  Out  of  the  dramatic 
monologues  he  devised  the  scheme  of  The  Eing 


250  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

and  the  Book,  a  narrative  poem  in  which  the 
episodes,  and  not  the  plot,  are  the  basis  of  the 
structure,  and  the  story  of  a  trifling  and  sordid 
crime  is  set  forth  as  it  appeared  to  the  minds  of 
the  chief  actors  in  succession.1  To  these  new 
forms  he  added  the  originality  of  an  extraordinary 
realism  in  style.  Few  poets  have  the  power  by 
a  word,  a  phrase,  a  flash  of  observation  in  detail 
to  make  you  see  the  event  as  Browning  makes 
you  see  it. 

Many  books  have  been  written  on  the  philosophy 
of  Browning's  poetry.  Stated  briefly,  its  message 
^  is  that  of  an  optimism  which  depends  on  a  recogni- 
tion of  the  strenuousness  of  life.  The  base  of  his 
creed,  as  of  Carlyle's,  is  the  gospel  of  labour ;  he 
believes  in  the  supreme  moral  worth  of  effort. 
Life  is  a  "  training  school "  for  a  future  existence, 
and  our  place  in  it  depends  on  the  courage  and 
strenuousness  with  which  we  have  laboured  here. 
Evil  is  in  the  world  only  as  an  instrument  in  the 
process  of  development ;  by  conquering  it  we 
exercise  our  spiritual  faculties  the  more.  Only 
torpor  is  the  supreme  sin,  even  as  in  The  Statue 
and  the  Bust,  where  effort  would  have  been  to  a 
criminal  end. 

1  This  way  of  telling  a  story,  which  is  implicit  in  the  method 
of  Richardson,  who  used  the  epistolary  form  to  make  his  readers 
see  a  situation  separately  from  the  respective  points  of  view  of 
all  the  persons  concerned  in  it,  has  been  revived  in  a  new  form 
in  our  own  day  by  Mr  Arnold  Bennett,  whose  novels  Clay  hanger 
and  Hilda  Lessway  make  a  new  departure  in  English  fiction. 


THE   VICTORIAN   AGE  251 

"  The  counter  our  lovers  staked  was  lost 
As  surely  as  if  it  were  lawful  coin  : 
And  the  sin  I  impute  to  each  frustrate  ghost 
Was,  the  unlit  lamp  and  the  ungirt  loin. 
Though  the  end  in  sight  was  a  crime,  I  say." 

All  the  other  main  ideas  of  his  poetry  fit  with 
perfect  consistency  on  to  his  scheme.  Love,  the 
manifestation  of  a  man's  or  a  woman's  nature  in 
the  highest  and  most  intimate  relationship  possible, 
is  an  opportunity — the  highest  opportunity — for 
spiritual  growth.  It  can  reach  this  end  though  an 
actual  and  earthly  union  is  impossible. 

"  She  has  lost  me,  I  have  gained  her ; 
Her  soul's  mine  and  thus  grown  perfect, 
I  shall  pass  my  life's  remainder. 
Life  will  just  hold  out  the  proving 
Both  our  powers,  alone  and  blended  : 
And  then  come  the  next  life  quickly ! 
This  world's  use  will  have  been  ended." 

It  follows  that  the  reward  of  effort  is  the  promise 
of  immortality,  and  that  for  each  man,  just  because 
his  thoughts  and  motives  taken  together  count,  and 
not  one  alone,  there  is  infinite  hope. 

The  contemporaries  of  Tennyson  and  Browning 
in  poetry  divide  themselves  into  three  separate 
schools.  Nearest  to  them  in  temper  is  the  school  of  ^ 
Matthew  Arnold  and  Clough  ;  they  have  the  same 
quick  sensitiveness  to  the  intellectual  tendencies 
of  the  age,  but  their  foothold  in  a  time  of  shifting 
and  dissolving  creeds  is  a  stoical  resignation  very 
different  from  the  buoyant  optimism  of  Browning, 


252  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

or  Tennyson's  mixture  of  science  and  doubt  and 
faith.  Very  remote  from  them,  on  the  other  hand, 
is  the  backward-gazing  medisevalism  of  Rossetti 
and  his  circle,  who  revived  (Rossetti  from  Italian 
sources,  Morris  from  Norman)  a  Middle  Age  which 
neither  Scott  nor  Coleridge  had  more  than  partially 
and  brokenly  understood.  The  last  school,  that 
to  which  Swinburne  and  Meredith  with  all  their 
differences  unite  in  belonging,  gave  up  Christianity 
with  scarcely  so  much  as  a  regret — 

"We  have  said  to  the  dream  that  caress'd  and  the  dread 

that  smote  us, 
Good-night  and  good-bye  " — 

and  turned  with  a  new  hope  and  exultation  to  the 
worship  of  our  immemorial  mother  the  earth.  In 
both  of  them,  the  note  of  enthusiasm  for  political 
liberty  which  had  been  lost  in  Wordsworth  after 
1815,  and  was  too  early  extinguished  with  Shelley, 
was  revived  by  the  Italian  Revolution  in  splendour 
and  fire. 

(3) 

As  one  gets  nearer  one's  own  time,  a  certain 
change  comes  insensibly  over  one's  literary  studies. 
Literature  comes  more  and  more  to  mean  imagin- 
ative literature  or  writing  about  imaginative  litera- 
ture. The  mass  of  writing  comes  to  be  taken  not 
as  literature,  but  as  argument  or  information  ;  we 
consider  it  purely  from  the  point  of  view  of  its 
subject-matter.  A  comparison  will  make  this  at 
once  clear.  When  a  man  reads  Bacon,  he  com- 


ALGERNON   CHARLES  SWINBURNE. 

From  a  painting  by  G.  F.   Watts,  R.A 


THE   VICTORIAN   AGE  253 

monly  regards  himself  as  engaged  in  the  study  of 
English  literature ;  when  he  reads  Darwin,  he  is 
occupied  in  the  study  of  natural  science.  A 
reader  of  Bacon's  time  would  have  looked  on  him 
as  we  look  on  Darwin  now. 

The  distinction  is  obviously  illogical,  but  a 
writer  on  English  literature  within  brief  limits  is 
forced  to  bow  to  it  if  he  wishes  his  book  to  avoid 
the  dreariness  of  a  summary,  and  he  can  plead  in 
extenuation  the  increased  literary  output  of  the 
later  age,  and  the  incompleteness  with  which  time 
so  far  has  done  its  work  in  sifting  the  memorable 
from  the  forgettable,  the  ephemeral  from  what  is 
going  to  last.  The  main  body  of  imaginative 
prose  literature — the  novel — is  treated  of  in  the 
next  chapter,  and  here  no  attempt  will  be  made  to 
deal  with  any  but  the  admittedly  greatest  names  of 
those  whose  object  in  writing  was  a  literary  object. 
Nothing  can  be  said,  for  instance,  of  the  writings, 
admirable  in  their  literary  qualities  of  purity  and 
terseness,  of  Darwin  or  Huxley  ;  or  of  the  polemics 
of  Newman  (whose  literary  qualities  have  been 
perhaps  overrated) ;  or  of  Kingsley  or  Maurice. 
These  authors,  one  and  all,  interpose  no  barrier,  so 
to  speak,  between  their  subject-matter  and  their 
readers ;  you  are  not  when  you  read  them  conscious 
of  a  literary  intention,  but  of  some  utilitarian  one  ; 
and  as  an  essay  on  English  literature  is  by  no 
means  a  handbook  to  serious  reading,  they  will  be 
no  more  mentioned  here. 


254  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

But  in  the  case  of  more  than  one  nineteenth- 
century  writer  in  prose,  this  method  of  exclusion 
cannot  apply.  Carlyle  and  Ruskin,  Macaulay  and 
Matthew  Arnold  were  all  professional  men  of 
letters;  each  in  the  voluminous  compass  of  his 
works  touched  on  a  large  variety  of  subjects ;  all 
wrote  highly  individual  and  peculiar  styles ;  and 
all,  without  being  exactly  professional  philosophers 
or  professional  preachers,  were,  as  every  good  man 
of  letters,  whether  he  denies  it  or  not,  is  and  must 
be,  lay  moralists  and  prophets.  Of  the  two  first 
Ruskin  is  plain  and  easily  read,  and  he  derives  his 
message;  Carlyle,  his  original,  is  apt  to  be  tortured 
and  obscure,  and  probably  some  guidance  to  him 
may  be  of  service  to  those  who  embark  on  his 
works. 

As  we  saw,  he  was  the  oldest  of  the  Victorians  ; 
he  was  over  forty  when  the  Queen  came  to  the 
throne.  Already  his  years  of  preparation  in  Scot- 
land, town  and  country,  were  over,  and  he  had 
settled  in  that  famous  little  house  in  Chelsea  which 
for  nearly  half  a  century  to  come  was  to  be  one  of 
the  central  hearths  of  literary  London.  More  than 
that,  he  had  already  fully  formed  his  mode  of 
thought  and  his  peculiar  style.  Sartor  Resartus 
was  written  and  published  serially  before  the  Queen 
came  to  the  throne ;  the  French  Revolution  came 
in  the  year  of  her  accession  at  the  very  time  that 
Carlyle's  lectures  were  making  him  a  fashionable 
sensation;  most  of  his  miscellaneous  essays  had 


THE   VICTORIAN  >GE  255 

already  appeared  in  the  reviews.  But  with  the 
strict  Victorian  era,  as  if  to  justify  the  usually 
arbitrary  division  of  literary  history  by  dynastic 
periods,  there  came  a  new  spirit  into  his  work. 
For  the  first  time  he  applied  his  peculiar  system  of 
ideas  to  contemporary  politics.  Chartism  appeared 
in  1839 ;  Past  and  Present,  which  does  the  same 
thing  as  Chartism  in  an  artistic  form,  three  years 
later.  They  were  followed  by  one  other  book — 
Latter-Day  Pamphlets — addressed  particularly  to 
contemporary  conditions,  and  by  two  remarkable 
and  voluminous  historical  works.  Then  came  the 
death  of  his  wife,  and  for  the  last  fifteen  years  of 
his  life  silence,  broken  only  briefly  and  at  rare 
intervals. 

The  reader  who  comes  to  Carlyle  with  precon- 
ceived notions  based  on  what  he  has  heard  of  the 
subject-matter  of  his  books  is  certain  to  be  surprised 
by  what  he  finds.  There  are  histories  in  the  canon 
of  his  works  and  pamphlets  on  contemporary 
problems,  but  they  are  composed  on  a  plan  that 
no  other  historian  and  no  other  social  reformer 
would  own.  A  reader  will  find  in  them  no  argu- 
ment, next  to  no  reasoning,  and  little  practical 
judgment.  Carlyle  was  not  a  great  "  thinker  "  in 
the  strictest  sense  of  that  term.  He  was  under 
the  control,  not  of  his  reason,  but  of  his  emotions ;  ( 
deep  feeling,  a  volcanic  intensity  of  temperament 
flaming  into  the  light  arid  heat  of  prophecy,  in- 
vective, derision,  or  a  simple  splendour  of  eloquence, 


256  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

is  the  characteristic  of  his  work.  Against  cold- 
blooded argument  his  passionate  nature  rose  in 
fierce  rebellion ;  he  had  no  patience  with  the 
formalist  or  the  doctrinaire.  Nor  had  he  the 
faculty  of  analysis ;  his  historical  works  are  a 
series  of  pictures,  splendidly  and  vividly  con- 
ceived, and  with  enormous  colour  and  a  fine 
illusion  of  reality,  but  one-sided  as  regards  the 
truth.  In  his  essays  on  hero-worship  he  contents 
himself  with  a  noisy  reiteration  of  the  general 
predicate  of  heroism ;  there  is  very  little  except 
their  names  and  the  titles  to  differentiate  one  sort 
of  hero  from  another.  His  picture  of  contemporary 
conditions  is  not  so  much  a  reasoned  indictment 
"  as  a  wild  and  fantastic  orgy  of  epithets :  "  dark 
simmering  pit  of  Tophet,"  "bottomless  universal 
hypocrisies,"  and  all  the  rest.  In  it  all  he  left  no 
practical  scheme.  His  works  are  fundamentally 
;not  about  politics  or  history  or  literature,  but 
'  about  himself.  They  are  the  exposition  of  a 
splendid  egotism,  fiercely  enthusiastic  about  one 
or  two  deeply  held  convictions ;  their  strength 
does  not  lie  in  their  matter  of  fact. 

This  is,  perhaps,  a  condemnation  of  him  in  the 
minds  of  those  people  who  ask  of  a  social  reformer 
an  actuarially  accurate  scheme  for  the  abolition  of 
poverty,  or  from  a  prophet  a  correct  forecast  of  the 
result  of  the  next  general  election.  Carlyle  has 
little  help  for  these  and  no  message  save  the  dis- 
concerting one  of  their  own  futility.  His  message 


THE   VICTORIAN  AGE  257 

is  at  once  larger  and  simpler,  for  though  his  form 
was  prose,  his  soul  was  a  poet's  soul,  and  what  he 
has  to  say  is  a  poet's  word.  In  a  way,  it  is  partly 
Wordsworth's  own.  The  chief  end  of  life,  his 
message  is,  is  the  performance  of  duty,  chiefly  the  -\ 
duty  of  work.  "Do  thy  little  stroke  of  work; 
this  is  Nature's  voice,  and  the  sum  of  all  the 
commandments,  to  each  man."  All  true  work  is 
religion,  all  true  work  is  worship ;  to  labour  is  to 
pray.  And  after  work,  obedience  the  best  dis^ 
cipline,  so  he  says  in  Past  and  Present,  for  govern- 
ing, and  "  our  universal  duty  and  destiny  ;  wherein 
whoso  will  not  bend  must  break."  Carlyle  asked 
of  every  man  action  and  obedience  and  to  bow 
to  duty ;  he  also  required  of  him  sincerity  and  ^ 
veracity,  the  duty  of  being  a  real  and  not  a  sham, 
a  strenuous  warfare  against  cant.  The  historical 
facts  with  which  he  had  to  deal  he  grouped  under 
these  embracing  categories,  and  in  the  French 
Revolution,  which  is  as  much  a  treasure-house  of 
his  philosophy  as  a  history,  there  is  hardly  a  page 
on  which  they  do  not  appear.  "Quack-ridden," 
he  says,  "  in  that  one  word  lies  all  misery  whatso- 


ever." 


These  bare  elemental  precepts  he  clothes  in  a 
garment  of  amazing  and  bizarre  richness.  There 
is  nothing  else  in  English  faintly  resembling  the 
astonishing  eccentricity  and  individuality  of  his 
style.  Gifted  with  an  extraordinarily  excitable 

and  vivid  imagination ;  seeing  things  with  sudden 

17 


258  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

and  tremendous  vividness,  as  in  a  searchlight  or  a 
lightning  flash,  he  contrived  to  convey  to  his 
readers  his  impressions  full  charged  with  the 
original  emotion  that  produced  them,  and  thus 
with  the  highest  poetic  effect.  There  is  nothing 
in  all  descriptive  writing  to  match  the  vividness  of 
some  of  the  scenes  in  the  French  Revolution  or 
in  the  narrative  part  of  Cromwell's  Letters  and 
Speeches,  or,  more  than  perhaps  in  any  of  his  books, 
because  in  it  he  was  setting  down  deep-seated 
impressions  of  his  boyhood  rather  than  those  got 
from  brooding  over  documents,  in  Sartor  Resartus. 
Alongside  this  unmatched  pictorial  vividness  and 
a  quite  amazing  richness  and  rhythm  of  language, 
more  surprising  and  original  than  anything  out 
of  Shakespeare,  there  are  of  course  striking  defects 
— a  wearisome  reiteration  of  emphasis,  a  clumsiness 
of  construction,  a  saddening  fondness  for  solecisms 
and  hybrid  inventions  of  his  own.  The  reader 
who  is  interested  in  these  (and  everyone  who  reads 
him  is  forced  to  become  so)  will  find  them  faith- 
fully dealt  with  in  John  Sterling's  remarkable 
letter  (quoted  in  Carlyle's  Life  of  Sterling]  on 
Sartor  Resartus.  But  gross  as  they  are,  and 
frequently  as  they  provide  matter  for  serious 
offence,  these  eccentricities  of  language  link  them- 
selves up  in  a  strange  indissoluble  way  with 
Carlyle's  individuality  and  his  power  as  an  artist. 
They  are  not  to  be  imitated,  but  he  would  be  much 
less  than  he  is  without  them,  and  they  act  by  their 


THE   VICTORIAN   AGE  259 

very  strength  and  pungency  as  a  preservative  of 
his  work.  That  of  all  the  political  pamphlets 
which  the  new  era  of  reform  occasioned,  his,  which 
were  the  least  in  sympathy  with  it  and  are  the 
furthest  off  the  main  stream  of  our  political  thinking 
now,  alone  continue  to  be  read,  must  be  laid  down 
not  only  to  the  prophetic  fervour  and  fire  of  their 
inspiration  but  to  the  dark  and  violent  magic  of 
their  style. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE   NOVEL 

(1) 

THE  faculty  for  telling  stories  is  the  oldest  artistic 
faculty  in  the  world,  and  the  deepest  implanted  in 
the  heart  of  man.  Before  the  rudest  cave-pictures 
were  scratched  on  the  stone,  the  story-teller,  it  is 
not  unreasonable  to  suppose,  was  plying  his  trade. 
All  early  poetry  is  simply  story-telling  in  verse. 
Stories  are  the  first  literary  interest  of  the  awaken- 
ing mind  of  a  child.  As  that  is  so,  it  is  strange 
that  the  novel,  which  of  all  literary  ways  of  story- 
telling seems  closest  to  the  unstudied  tale-spinning 
of  talk,  should  be  the  late  discovery  that  it  is.  Of 
all  the  main  forms  into  which  the  literary  impulse 
moulds  the  stuff  of  imagination,  the  novel  is  the 
last  to  be  devised.  The  drama  dates  from  pre- 
historic times,  so  does  the  epic,  the  ballad  and  the 
lyric.  The  novel  as  we  know  it  dates,  practically 
->  speaking,  from  1740.  What  is  the  reason  it  is  so 
late  in  appearing  ? 

The  answer  is,  partly  at  any  rate,  that  there 
seems  no  room  for  good  drama  and  good  fiction  at 
the  same  time  in  literature ;  drama  and  novels  do 

260 


THOMAS   CARLYLE. 

Front  the  portrait  by  James  M'Nei^  Whist  let 


THE   NOVEL  261 

not  easily  exist  side  by  side,  and  the  novel  had  to 
wait  for  the  decadence  of  the  drama  before  it  could 
appear  and  triumph.  If  one  were  to  make  a  table 
of  succession  for  the  various  kinds  of  literature  as 
they  have  been  used  naturally  and  spontaneously 
(not  academically),  the  order  would  be  the  epic, 
the  drama,  the  novelj  and  it  would  be  obvious  at 
once  that  the  order  stood  for  something  more  than 
chronological  succession,  and  that  literature  in  its 
function  as  a  representation  and  criticism  of  life 
passed  from  form  to  form  in  the  search  of  greater 
freedom,  greater  subtlety,  and  greater  power.  At 
present  we  seem  to  be  at  the  climax  of  the  third 
stage  in  this  development ;  there  are  signs  that  the 
fourth  is  on  the  way,  and  that  it  will  be  a  return  to 
drama — not  to  the  old,  formal,  ordered  kind,  but 
something  new  and  freer,  ready  to  gather  up  and 
interpret  what  there  is  of  newness  and  freedom  in 
the  spirit  of  man  and  the  society  in  which  he  lives 
and  to  suit  its  methods  to  the  new  material  which 
comes  to  its  hand. 

The  novel,  then,  had  to  wait  for  the  drama's 
decline,  but  there  was  literary  story-telling  long  be- 
fore that.  There  were  medjgeval^ romances  in  prose^ 
and  verse ;  Renaissance  pastoraljtales,  and  stories 
of  adventure  ;  collections,  plenty  of  them,  of  short 
stories  modelled  on  Boccaccio,  like  those  in  Painter's 
Palace  of  Pleasure.  But  none  of  these,  not  even 
romances  which  deal  in  moral  and  sententious  advice 
like  Euphues,  approach  the  essence  of  the  novel  as 


262  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

I/we  know  it.  They  are  all  (except  Euphues,  which 
is  simply  a  framework  of  travel  for  a  book  of 
aphorisms)  simple  and  objective;  they  set  forth 
incidents  or  series  of  incidents  ;  long  or  short,  they 
are  anecdotes  only — they  take  little  account  of 
character.  It  was  impossible  we  should  have  the 
novel  as  distinct  from  the  tale,  till  stories  acquired 
a  subjective  interest  for  us  ;  till  we  began  to  think 
about  character  and  to  look  at  actions  not  only 
outwardly,  but  within  at  their  springs. 

As  has  been  stated  earlier  in  this  book,  it  was 
in  the  seventeenth^entury_  that  this  interest  in 
character  was  first  wakened.  Shakespeare  had 
brought  to  the  drama,  which  before  him  was  con- 
cerned with  actions  viewed  outwardly,  a  psycho- 
logical interest ;  he  had  taught  that  "  character  is 
destiny,"  and  that  men's  actions  and  fates  spring 
not  from  outward  agencies,  but  from  within  in  their 
own  souls.  The  age  began  to  take  a  deep  and 
curious  interest  in  men's  lives ;  biography  was 
written  for  the  first  time  and  autobiography ;  it  is 
the  great  period  of  memoir- writing  both  in  England 
__  and  France ;  authors  like  Robert  Burton  came, 
whose  delight  was  to  dig  down  into  human  nature 
in  search  for  oddities  and  individualities  of  disposi- 
tion ;  humanity  as  the  great  subject  of  enquiry 
for  all  men  came  to  its  own.  All  this  has  a  direct 
bearing  on  the  birth  of  the  novel.  One  transient 
\  /  form  of  literature  in  the  seventeenth  century — the 
V  -  Character — is  an  ancestor  in  the  direct  line.  The 


THE  NOVEL  263 

collections  of  them — Earle's  Microcosmography  is 
the  best — are  not  very  exciting  reading,  and  they 
never  perhaps  quite  succeeded  in  naturalizing  a 
form  borrowed  from  the  later  age  of  Greece,  but 
their  importance  in  the  history  of  the  novel  to  come  * 
is  clear.  Take  them  ajidjidd  them  to  the  story  of  \/ 
adventure — i.e.  introduce  eachlfesh  person  in  your 
plot  with  a  description  in  the  character  form,  and 
the  step  you  have  made  towards  the  novel  is  a  long 
one;  you  have  given  to  plot  which  was  already 
there  the  added  interest  of  character. 

That,  however,  was  not  quite  how  the  thing 
worked  in  actual  fact.  At  the  heels  of  the 
"  Character  "  came  the  periodical  essay  of  Addison  y 
and  Steele.  Their  interest  in  contemporary  types~^ 
was  of  the  same  quality  as  Earle's  or  Hall's,  but 
they  went  a  different  way  to  work.  Where  these 
compressed  and  cultivated  a  style  which  was  stac- 
cato and  epigrammatic,  huddling  all  the  traits 
of  their  subject  in  short  sharp  sentences  that  follow 
each  other  with  all  the  brevity  and  curtness  of 
items  in  a  prescription,  Addison  and  Steele 
observed  a  more  artistic  plan.  They  made,  as  it 
were,  the  prescription  up,  adding  one  ingredient 
after  another  slowly  as  the  mixture  dissolved.  You 
are  introduced  to  Sir  Roger  de  Coverley,  and  to  a 
number  of  other  typical  people,  and  then,  in  a  series 
of  essays  which  if  they  were  disengaged  from  their 
setting  would  be  to  all  intents  a  novel  and  a  fine 
one,  you  are  made  aware  one  by  one  of  different 


264  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

traits  in  the  squire's  character  and  those  of  his 
friends,  each  trait  generally  enshrined  in  an  incident 
which  illustrates  it ;  you  get  to  know  them,  that 
is,  gradually,  as  you  would  in  real  life,  and  not  all 
in  a  breath,  in  a  series  of  compressed  statements, 
as  is  the  way  of  the  character  writers.  With  the 
..  Coverley  essays  in  the  Spectator,  the  novel  in  one 
of  its  forms — that  in  which  an  invisible  and  all- 
knowing  narrator  tells  a  story  in  which  someone 
else  whose  character  he  lays  bare  for  us  is  the  hero 
— is  as  good  as  achieved. 

Another  manner  of  fiction — the  autobiographical 
— had  already  been  invented.  It  grew  directly  out 
of  the  public  interest  in  autobiography,  and  particu- 
larly in  the  tales  of  their  voyages  which  the  dis- 
coverers wrote  and  published  on  their  return  from 
their  adventures.  Its  establishment  in  literature 
V  was  the  work  of  two  authors,  Bunyan^and  Defoe. 
The  books  of  Bunyan,  whether  they  are  told  in  the 
first  person  or  no,  are  and  were  meant  to  be  auto- 
biographical ;  their  interest  is  a  subjective  interest. 
Here  is  a  man  who  endeavours  to  interest  you,  not 
in  the  character  of  some  other  person  he  has 
imagined  or  observed,  but  in  himself.  His  treat- 
ment of  it  is  characteristic  of  the  awakening  talent 
for  fiction  of  his  time.  The  Pilgrims  Progress  is 
begun  as  an  allegory,  and  so  continues  for  a  little 
space  till  the  story  takes  hold  of  the  author.  When 
it  does,  whether  he  knew  it  or  not,  allegory  goes  to 
the  winds.  But  the  autobiographical  form  of  fiction 


THE   NOVEL  265 

in  its  highest  art  is  the  creation  of  Defoe.  He  told 
stories  of  adventure,  incidents  modelled  on  real  life, 
as  many  tellers  of  tales  had  done  before  him,  but 
to  the  form  as  he  found  it  he  added  a  psychological 
interest — the  interest  of  the  character  of  the 
narrator.  He  contrived  to  observe  in  his  writing  ^ 
a  scrupulous  and  realistic  fidelity  and  appropriate- 
ness to  the  conditions  in  which  the  story  was  to  be 
told.  We  learn  about  Crusoe's  island,  for  instance, 
gradually  just  as  Crusoe  learns  of  it  himself,  though 
the  author  is  careful,  by  taking  his  narrator  up  to  a 
high  point  of  vantage  the  day  after  his  arrival,  that 
we  shall  learn  the  essentials  of  it,  so  long  as  veri- 
similitude is  not  sacrificed,  as  soon  as  possible.  It 
is  the  paradox  of  the  English  novel  that  these  our 
earliest  efforts  in  fiction  were  meant,  unlike  the 
romances  which  preceded  them,  to  pass  for  truth. 
Defoe's  Journal  of  the  Plague  Year  was  widely 
taken  as  literal  fact,  and  it  is  still  quoted  as  such 
occasionally  by  rash  though  reputable  historians.  \/ 
So  that  in  England  the  novel  began  with  realism, 
as  it  has  culminated,  and  across  two  centuries 
Defoe  and  the  "  naturalists "  meet  each  other. 
Defoe,  it  is  proper  also  in  this  place  to  notice,  fixed 
the  peculiar  form  of  the  historical  novel.  In  his 
Memoirs  of  a  Cavalier,  the  narrative  of  an  imaginary 
person's  adventures  in  a  historical  setting  is  inter- 
spersed with  the  entrance  of  actual  historical  per- 
sonages, exactly  the  method  of  historical  romancing 
which  was  brought  to  perfection  by  Sir  Walter  Scott. 


266  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

(2) 

In  the  eighteenth  century  came  the  decline  of 
the  drama  for  which  the  novel  had  been  waiting. 
By  1660  the  romantic  drama  of  Elizabeth's  time 
was  dead;  the  comedy  of  the  Restoration  which 
followed,  witty  and  brilliant  though  it  was,  reflected 
a  society  too  licentious  and  artificial  to  secure  it 
permanence  ;  by  the  time  of  Addison  play- writing 
had  fallen  to  journey-work,  and  the  theatre  to 
openly  expressed  contempt.  When  Richardson 
and  Fielding  published  their  novels  there  was 
nothing  to  compete  with  fiction  in  the  popular 
taste.  And  besides,  a  new  class  of  readers  had 
arrived  for  whom  some  new  kind  of  literature  was 
needed.  The  growth  of  business  and  prosperity 
had  increased  the  number  of  persons  of  leisure. 
Town  society  and  social  life  as  we  know  it  to-day 
dates  from  precisely  this  period,  and  society  must 
needs  have  something,  humanly  interesting  and 
not  too  exacting,  to  read.  Addison  and  Steele 
ministered  to  this  new  taste,  but  in  too  brief  a 
manner  to  satisfy  it ;  it  needed  something  more. 
It  would  seem  as  though  the  novel  had  been 
waiting  for  this  favourable  circumstance.  In  a 
sudden  burst  of  prolific  inventiveness,  which  can 
be  paralleled  in  all  letters  only  by  the  period 
of  Marlowe  and  Shakespeare,  masterpiece  after 
masterpiece  poured  from  the  press.  Within  two 
generations,  besides  Richardson  and  Fielding  came 


THE   NOVEL  267 

Sterne   and   Goldsmith   and  Smollett  and  Fanny^ 

Burneyjn   naturalism,    and  ^Horace  W_alpo!e_and 

Mrs  RadclifFe  in  the  new:  way  of  romance.     Novels 

)y  minor  authors  were  published  in  thousands  as 

well.     The  novel,  in  fact,  besides  being  the  occasion 

of  literature  of  the  highest  class,  attracted  by  its 

ucrativeness   that   undercurrent   of  journey-work 

authorship   which   had   hitherto    busied    itself    in 

joetry  or  plays.     Fiction  has  been  its  chief  occupa- 

tion ever  since. 

Anything  like  a  detailed  criticism  or  even  a  bare 
narrative  of  this  voluminous  literature  is  plainly 
mpossible  within  the  limits  of  a  single  chapter. 
Readers  must  go  for  it  to  books  on  the  subject. 
It  is  possible  here  merely  to  draw  attention  to 
those  authors  to  whom  the  English  novel  as  a 


more  or  less  fixed  form  is  indebted  for  it 
characteristics.  Foremost  among  these  are  Rich- 
ardson and  Fielding  ;  after  them  there  is  Walter 
Scott.  After  him,  in  the  nineteenth  century, 
Dickens  and  Meredith  and  Mr  Hardy  ;  last  of  all 
the  French  realists  and  the  new  school  of  romance. 
To  one  or  other  of  these  originals  all  the  great 
authors  in  the  long  list  of  English  novelists  owe 
their  method  and  their  choice  of  subject-matter. 

With    Defoe   fiction    gained    verisimilitude,   it  V  / 
ceased  to  deal  with   the   incredible;   it  aimed   at 
exhibiting,  though  in  strange  and  memorable  cir- 
cumstances, the   workings  of  the   ordinary  mind. 
It  is  Richardson's  maiiT  "clamfTo  fame  that   he 


v 


268  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

contrived   a  form   of   novel   which    exhibited   am 
ordinary  mind  working  in  normal   circumstances, 
and  that  he  did  this  with  a  minuteness  which  till! 
then  had  never  been  thought  of  and  has  not  since- 
been   surpassed.      His    talent    is    very  exactly  a; 
microscopical  talent;  under  it   the  common  stufff 
of    life,    separated    from     its     surroundings    and! 
magnified     beyond     previous    knowledge,     yields 
strange   and   new   and   deeply  interesting   sights. 
He   carried  into   the   sjtu^y_jof_character,    which  i 
had  begun  in  Addison  with  an  eye  to   externals: 
and  eccentricities,  a  minute  faculty  of  inspections 
which  watched  and  recorded   unconscious  mental  I 
and  emotional  processes. 

To  do  this  he  employed  a  method  which  was,  in 
effect,  a  compromise  between  that  of  the  autobio- 
graphy and  that  of  the  tale  told  by  an  invisible* 
narrator.  The  weakness  of  the  autobiography  is. 
that  it  can  write  only  of  events  within  the  know- 
ledge of  the  supposed  speaker,  and  that  conse- 
quently the  presentation  of  all  but  one  of  the 
characters  of  the  book  is  an  external  presentation. 
We  know,  that  is,  of  Man  Friday  only  what 
Crusoe  could,  according  to  realistic  appropriateness, 
tell  us  about  him.  We  do  not  know  what  he 
thought  or  felt  within  himself.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  method  of  invisible  narration  had  not  at  this 
time  acquired  the  faculty  which  it  possesses  now  of 
doing  Friday's  thinking  aloud  or  exposing  fully  the 
workings  of  his  mind.  So  that  Richardson,  whose 


THE  NOVEL 


269 


interests  were  psychological,  whose   strength   and 
lent  lay  in  the  presentation  of  the  states  of  mind 
ippropriate  to  situations  of  passion  or  intrigue,  had 
look  about  him  for  a  new  form,  and  that  form 
found  in  the  novel  of  letters.     In  a  way,  if  the 
id  of  a  novel  be  the  presentation  not  of  action, 
>ut  of  the  springs  of  action ;  if  the  external  event 
in  it  always  of  less  importance  than  the  emotions 
rhich  conditioned  it,  and  the  emotions  which   it 
working,  the  novel  of  letters  is  the   supreme 
tanner  for  fiction.     Consider  the   possibilities  of 
it.     There  is  a  series  of  events  in  which  A,  B,  and  C 
j  concerned.     Not  only  can  the  outward  events 
narrated  as  they  appeared  to  all  three  separately 
>y  means  of  letters  from  each  to  another,  or   to 
fourth  party,  but  the  motives  of  each,  and  the 
emotions  which  each  experiences~as  a  result  of  the 
rtions  of  the  others  or  them  all,  can  be  laid  bare. 
ro  other  method  can  wind  itself  so  completely 
ito    the    psychological    intricacies    and    recesses 
h  lie  behind  every  event.     It  is  a  mistake  to 
(suppose  that  Richardson  adopted  it  haphazard  or 
merely  because   he   was   a   "model  letter- writer " 
in  his  youth.     He  had  a  consciously  worked-out 
jtheory  and  a  deliberate  artistic  purpose.     A  mere 
j  chronicle  of  events,  he  says  himself  in  Sir  Charles 
Grandison,   would   be   shorter,   but  would   it  be 
I  equally  interesting?     Yet  the  form,  as  everybody 
knows,   has   not   been   popular;    even   an    expert 
I  no vel-reader    could    hardly    name    offhand    more 


270  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

than  two  or  three  examples  of  it  since  Richardson's 
day.  Why  is  this  ?  Well,  chiefly  it  is  because 
the  mass  of  novelists  have  not  had  Richardson's 
knowledge  of,  or  interest  in,  the  psychological 
under-side  of  life,  and  those  who  have,  as,  amongst 
the  moderns,  Henry  James,  have  devised  out  of 
the  convention  of  the  invisible  narrator  a  method 
by  which  they  can  with  greater  economy  attain  in 
practice  fairly  good  results.  For  the  mere  narra- 
tion of  action  in  which  the  study  of  character  plays 
a  subsidiary  part,  it  was,  of  course,  from  the  begin- 
ning impossible.  Scott  turned  aside  at  the  height 
of  his  power  to  try  it  in  Redgauntlet;  he  never 
made  a  second  attempt. 

For  Richardson's  purpose,  it  answered  admirably, 
and  he  used  it  with  supreme  effect.  Particularly 
he  excelled  in  that  side  of  the  novelist's  craft  which 
has  ever  since  (whether  because  he  started  it  or 
not)  proved  the  subtlest  and  most  attractive,  the 
presentation  of  women.  Richardson  was  one  of 
those  men  who  are  not  at  their  ease  in  other  men's 
society,  and  whom  other  men,  to  put  it  plainly,  are 
apt  to  regard  as  coxcombs  and  fools.  But  he  had 
a  genius  for  the  friendship  and  confidence  of 
women.  In  his  youth  he  wrote  love-letters  for 
them.  His  first  novel  grew  out  of  a  plan  to 
exhibit  in  a  series  of  letters  the  quality  of  feminine 
virtue,  and  in  its  essence  (though  with  a  ludicrous 
and  so  to  speak  "  kitchen-maidish  "  misunderstand- 
ing of  his  own  sex)  adheres  to  the  plan.  His 


THE   NOVEL  271 

second  novel,  Sir  Charles  Grandison,  which  designs 
to  set  up  a  model  man  against  the  monster  of  I  / 
iniquity  in  Pamela,  is  successful  only  so  far  as  it 
exhibits  the  thoughts  and  feelings  of  the  heroine 
whom  Grandison  ultimately  marries.  His  last, 
Clarissa  Harlowe,  is  a  masterpiece  of  sympathetic  \/ 
divination  into  the  feminine  mind.  Clarissa  is,  as 
has  been  well  said,  the  "  Eve  of  fiction,  the  proto- 
type of  the  modern  heroine  " ;  feminine  psychology, 
as  good  as  unknown  before  (Shakespeare's  women 
being  the  "  Fridays  "  of  a  highly  intelligent  Crusoe), 
has  hardly  been  brought  further  since.  But 
Clarissa  is  more  than  mere  psychology;  whether 
she  represents  a  contemporary  tendency  or  whether 
Richardson  made  her  so,  she  starts  a  new  epoch. 
"  This,"  says  Henley,  "  is  perhaps  her  finest  virtue 
as  it  is  certainly  her  greatest  charm  :  that  until  she 
set  the  example,  woman  in  literature  as  a  self- 
suffering  individuality,  as  an  existence  endowed 
with  equal  rights  to  independence — of  choice, 
volition,  action — with  man  had  not  begun  to  be." 
She  had  not  begun  to  be  it  in  life  either. 

What  Richardson  did  for  the  subtlest  part  of  a 
novelist's  business,  his  dealings  with  psychology, 
Fielding  did  for  the  most  necessary  part  of  it,  the^l/ 
telling  nfthe  st-ory.  Before  him  hardly  any  story 
had  been  told  well ;  even  if  it  had  been  plain  and 
clear  as  in  Bunyan  and  Defoe  it  had  lacked  the 
emphasis,  the  light  and  shade,  of  skilful  grouping. 
On  the  "  picaresque  "  (so  the  autobiographical  form 


272  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

was  called  abroad)  convention  of  a  journey  he 
grafted  a  structure  based  in  its  outline  on  the  form 
of  the  ancient  epic.  It  proved  extraordinarily 
suitable  for  his  purpose.  Not  only  did  it  make 
it  easy  for  him  to  lighten  his  narrative  with  excur- 
sions in  a  heightened  style,  burlesquing  his  origins, 
but  it  gave  him  at  once  the  right  attitude  to  his 
material.  He  told  his  story  as  one  who  knew 
everything ;  could  tell  conversations  and  incidents 
as  he  conceived  them  happening,  with  no  violation 
of  credibility,  nor  any  strain  on  his  reader's  imagina- 
tion ;  and  without  any  impropriety  could  interpose 
in  his  own  person,  recalling  things  to  the  reader 
which  might  have  escaped  his  attention,  pointing 
at  parallels  he  might  have  missed,  laying  bare  the 
irony  or  humour  beneath  a  situation.  He  allowed 
himself  digressions  and  episodes,  told  separate  tales 
in  the  middle  of  the  action,  introduced,  as  in 
^Partridge's  visit  to  the  theatre,  the  added  piquancy 
of  topical  allusion ;  in  fact  he  did  anything  he 
chose.  And  he  laid  down  that  free  form  of  the 
novel  which  is  characteristically  English,  and  from 
which,  in  its  essence,  no  one  till  the  modern  Realists 
has  made  a  serious  departure. 

In  the  matter  of  his  novels,  he  excels  by  reason 
of  a  Shakespearean  sense  of  character  and  by  the 
richness  and  Tightness  of  his  faculty  of  humour. 
He  had  a  quick  eye  for  contemporary  types,  and 
an  amazing  power  of  building  out  of  them  men 
and  women  whose  individuality  is  full  and  rounded. 


THE  NOVEL  273 

You  do  not  feel,  as  you  do  with  Richardson,  that 
his  fabric  is  spun  silk- worm- wise  out  of  himself ;  on 
the  contrary,  you  know  it  to  be  the  fruit  of  a  gentle 
and  observant  nature,  and  of  a  stock  of  funda- 
mental human  sympathy.  His  gallery  of  portraits, 
Joseph  Andrews,  Parson  Adams,  Parson  Trulliber, 
Jones,  Blifil,  Partridge,  Sophia  and  her  father,  and 
all  the  rest,  are  each  of  them  minute  studies  of 
separate  people ;  they  live  and  move  according  to 
their  proper  natures ;  they  are  conceived  not  from 
without  but  from  within.  Both  Richardson  and 
Fielding  were  conscious  of  a  moral  intention ;  but 
where  Richardson  is  sentimental,  vulgar,  and 
moral  only  so  far  as  it  is  moral  (as  in  Pamela)  to 
inculcate  selling  at  the  highest  price  or  (as  in 
Grandisori)  to  avoid  temptations  which  never 
come  in  your  way,  Fielding's  morality  is  fresh  and 
healthy,  and  (though  not  quite  free  from  the  senti- 
mentality of  scoundrelism)  at  bottom  sane  and  true. 
His  knowledge  of  the  world  kept  him  right.  His 
acquaintance  with  life  is  wide,  and  his  insight  is 
keen  and  deep.  His  taste  is  almost  as  catholic  as 
Shakespeare's  own,  and  the  life  he  knew,  and  which 
other  men  knew,  he  handles  for  the  first  time  with 
the  freedom  and  imagination  of  an  artist. 

Each  of  the  two — Fielding  and  Richardson — 
had  his  host  of  followers.  Abroad  Richardson 
won  immediate  recognition ;  in  France  Diderot 
went  so  far  as  to  compare  him  with  Homer  and 

Moses !     He  gave  the   first   impulse  to   modern 

18 


274  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

French  fiction.  At  home,  less  happily,  he  set 
going  the  sentimental  school,  and  it  was  only  when 
that  had  passed  away  that — in  the  delicate  and 
subtle  character-study  of  Miss  Austen  —  his  in- 
fluence came  to  its  own. 

To  begin  with,  the  imitators  or  rivals  of  Fielding 
had  it  all  their  own  way  in  England.  The  most 
harming  of  them  was  perhaps  Goldsmith,  whose 
single  essay  in  novel- writing,  The  Vicar  of  Wake- 
Jield,  went  straight  to  the  hearts  of  his  readers~T:he 
moment  it  was  published  and  has  been  a  classic 
ever  since.  Of  the  others,  Sterne  won  the  greater 
reputation,  but  Smollett^gave  and  continues  to 
give  the  most  entertainment.  With  a  fine  stock 
of  experience  to  draw  upon — for  he  had  been  at  sea 
in  the  rough-and-tumble  life  of  the  eighteenth- 
century  navy, — Smollett  turned  his  hand  to  the 
jiovel  of  adventure  of  a  type  freer  and  more  full 
of  incident  than  Fielding's,  which  had  been  founded 
in  France  by  Lesage.  He  took,  however,  nothing 
but  his  plan  from  this  French  original,  and  the 
scene  in  which  his  novels  are  laid,  as  well  as  his 
characters  and  their  and  his  prejudices,  are  entirely 
British.  "  His  novels,"  said  Thackeray,  "  are  recol- 
lections of  his  own  adventures,  his  characters 
drawn,  as  I  should  think,  from  personages  with 
whom  he  had  become  acquainted  in  his  own  career 
of  life."  No  part  of  that  career  yielded  him  better 
material  than  his  time  at  sea,  and  the  sea  scenes  in 
Roderick  Random  are  the  best  things  of  their  kind 


/I  i  iw% 


HENRY   FIELDING. 
From  the  portrait  by  Hogarth  in  the  British  Museum. 


THE   NOVEL  275 

in  English  writing.  They  gave  the  impulse  to 
Captain  Marryat,  and,  what  with  that  and  the 
closeness  with  which  Dickens  in  some  of  his 
novels  followed  Smollett's  plan  of  writing,  he  may 
be  credited  with  having  as  deep  an  influence  on 
the  future  as  Fielding  himself.  He  was  coarser 
than  Fielding,  not  morally  but  in  the  eighteenth- 
century  way  of  brutality,  and  he  had  less  art.  But 
his  novels  cover  a  wider  range  of  experience,  their 
humours  are  broader,  they  give  a  greater  impres- 
sion of  fecundity  of  invention  than  anything  else 
of  their  time. 

No  other  writings  exemplify  so  well  the  complete 
freedom^of  construction  which  is  the  characteristic 
of  the  English  novel  than  those  of  Laurence  Sterne. 
His  greatest  book,  Tristram  Shandy,  purports  to  be 
a  record  of  the  life  and  opinions  of  its  hero.  In 
fact,  there  is  very  little  about  his  life  and  nothing 
about  his  opinions.  A  large  part  of  the  book  is 
taken  up  with  the  troublesome  business  of  getting 
him  born :  the  rest  of  it  mainly  with  the  eccentri- 
cities of  his  father,  a  humorist  and  philosopher  of 
a  type  which  seems  to  be  very  characteristic  of  its 
time,  and  was  looked  upon  by  other  countries  as 
peculiarly  English ;  with  his  mother,  his  Uncle 
Toby,  who  has  really  made  the  book  immortal, 
and  that  uncle's  servant,  Corporal  Trim.  Round 
about  these  figures,  with  no  sustained  narrative  or 
plot,  and  with  indeed  every  stress,  down  to  the 
typographical,  laid  upon  the  desultoriness  of  the 


276  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

novel,  Sterne  weaves  the  curious  irregular  and 
intermittent  web  of  his  imagination,  helping  him- 
self, without  acknowledgment,  to  large  borrowings 
from  older  authors  as  he  goes.  At  its  best,  when 
he  is  purely  pathetic,  or  when  his  humour  plays 
upon  the  subject  without  becoming  sniggering  or 
vulgar,  Sterne  is  a  fine  writer.  At  his  worst,  when 
his  pathos  passes,  as  it  constantly  does,  into  the 
singular  aberration  of  taste  called  sensibility,  he  is 
unendurable.  But  it  is  worth  remembering  that 
the  things  in  him  which  we  dislike  were  what  gave 
him  his  reputation  with  his  contemporaries  both  in 
England  and  France.  To  have  acquired  a  reputa- 
tion by  bad  work,  and  to  retain  it  by  virtue  of 
qualities  less  well  esteemed  when  the  work  was  done, 
is  not  a  bad  basis  for  permanency  in  literary  fame. 
Miss  Austen,  as  we  have  seen,  belongs  rather  to 
the  school  of  Richardson  than  to  that  of  Fielding, 
and  though  her  work  belongs  to  a  later  date,  it  is 
convenient  to  treat  her  here.  Her  work  represents 
the  domestic  novel  in  its  purest  form.  Like 
RicEardson,  she  drew  her  subjects  from  ordinary 
people,  and  her  desire  was  to  give  a  truthful  and 
minute  picture  of  ordinary  life  and  emotions ;  but 
unlike  Richardson,  whose  temperament  inclined 
him  to  write  about  a  people  a  grade  above  him  in 
the  social  scale,  Miss  Austen  held  resolutely  to  the 
actual  society  in  which  she  moved.  She  was  con- 
vinced that  a  really  veracious  picture  of  ordinary 
life  could  be  as  interesting  as  any  romance.  The 


THE   NOVEL  277 

people  and  incidents  that  she  works  upon  seem,  or 
must  have  seemed  to  the  readers  of  her  day,  to 
promise  little  that  was  interesting,  and,  as  we 
know  from  some  modern  writing  of  the  kind,  in 
hands  less  skilful  they  would  not  be  very  attractive. 
It  is  the  triumph  of  her  genius  that  she  can  make 
a  tea-party  in  Bath  or  at  a  country  rectoiy  as 
interesting,  and  in  the  literary  sense  of  the  word 
exciting,  to  the  reader  as  is  a  description  of  an 
adventurous  night  at  an  inn  by  Fielding,  or  of  a 
battlefield  by  Sir  Walter  Scott.  On  the  other 
hand,  though  she  excels  by  her  quiet  observation 
and  record  of  detail,  she  does  not,  like  the  realists 
later,  bore  us  with  detail  for  detail's  sake.  All  that 
she  writes  helps  to  develop  the  dramatic  truth  and 
effect  with  which  her  characters  are  displayed,  and, 
without  using  the  means  of  self-expression  with 
which  Richardson  endowed  his,  she  contrives  to 
give  to  her  people  a  not  less  vivid  impression  of 
reality.  If  we  miss  great  emotions,  that  is  simply 
because  in  the  society  which  she  set  herself  to 
depict  great  emotions  very  seldom  intrude.  Per- 
haps her  temperament  with  its  subtle  quality  of 
irony  and  detachment  would  not  have  allowed  her 
to  admit  their  existence. 

The  main  road  of  the  English  novel — the  road 
from    Ijelding_JbCLJDickena-  *nd    MprpHith— was    \  / 
widened  two  ways   by   Sir   Walter   Scott.      The     » 
historical  novel,  which   had   been  before  his  day 
either  an  essay  in  anachronism  with  nothing  histori- 


278  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

cal  in  it  but  the  date,  or  a  laborious  and  uninspired 
compilation  of  antiquarian  research,  took  form  and 
life  under  his  hands.  His  wide  reading,  stored  as 
it  was  in  a  marvellously  retentive  memory,  gave 
him  all  the  background  he  needed  to  achieve  a 
historical  setting,  and  allowed  him  to  concentrate 
his  attention  on  the  actual  telling  of  his  story ;  to 
which  his  genial  and  sympathetic  humanity  and 
his  quick  eye  for  character  gave  a  humorous  depth 
and  richness  that  was  all  his  own.  It  is  not  sur- 
prising that  he  made  the  historical  novel  a  literary 
vogue  all  over  Europe.  In  the  second  place,  he 
began  in  his  novels  of  Scottish  character  a  sympa- 
thetic study  of  nationality.  He  is  not,  perhaps,  a 
fair  guide  to  contemporary  conditions  ;  his  interests 
were  too  romantic  and  too  much  in  the  past  to 
catch  the  rattle  of  the  looms  that  caught  the  ear 
of  Gait,  and  if  we  want  a  picture  of  the  great  fact 
of  modern  Scotland,  its  industrialization,  it  is  to 
Gait  we  must  go.  But  in  his  comprehension  of 
the  essential  character  of  the  people  he  has  no 
rival ;  in  it  his  historical  sense  seconded  his  obser- 
vation, and  the  two  mingling  gave  us  the  pictures 
whose  depth  of  colour  and  truth  make  his  Scottish 
novels,  Old  Mortality,  The  Antiquary,  Redgauntlet, 
the  greatest  things  of  their  kind  in  literature. 

(3) 

The  peculiarly  national  style  of  fiction  founded 
by  Fielding  and  carried  on  by  his  followers  reached 


THE   NOVEL  279 

its  culminating  point  in  Vanity  Fair.  In  it  the 
reader  does  not  seem  to  be"  simply "pFesent  at  the 
unfolding  of  a  plot  the  end  of  which  is  constantly 
present  to  the  mind  of  the  author  and  to  which 
he  is  always  consciously  working,  every  incident 
having  a  bearing  on  the  course  of  the  action ; 
rather  he  feels  himself  to  be  the  spectator  of  a 
piece  of  life  which  is  too  large  and  complex  to  be 
under  the  control  of  a  creator,  which  moves  to  its 
close  not  under  the  impulsion  of  a  directing  hand, 
but  independently  impelled  by  causes  evolved  in  * 
the  course  of  its  happening.  With  this  added 
complexity  goes  a  more  frequent  interposition  of 
the  author  in  his  own  person — one  of  the  con- 
ventions, as  we  have  seen,  of  this  national  style. 
Thackeray  is  present  to  his  readers,  indeed,  not  as 
the  manager  who  pulls  the  strings  and  sets  the 
puppets  in  motion,  but  as  an  interpreter  who 
directs  the  reader's  attention  to  the  events  on  which 
he  lays  stress,  and  makes  them  a  starting-point  for 
his  own  moralizing.  This  persistent  moralizing— 
sham  cynical,  real  sentimental — this  thumping  of 
d^ath-bedTptllows,  as  in  the  dreadful  case  of  Miss 
Crawley,  makes  Thackeray's  use  of  the  personal 
interposition  almost  less  effective  than  that  of  any 
other  novelist.  Already  while  he  was  doing  it, 
Dickens  had  conquered  the  public  ;  and  the  English 
novel  was  making  its  second  fresh  start. 

He  is  an  innovator  in  more  ways  than  one.     In 
the  first  place/heTiTthe  earliest  novelist  to  practise 


280  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

a  conscious  artistry  of  plot.  The  Mystery  of 
Edwin  Drood  remains  mysterious,  but  those  who 
essay  to  conjecture  the  end  of  that  unfinished  story 
have  at  least  the  surety  that  its  end,  full  worked  out 
in  all  its  details,  had  been  in  its  author's  mind 
before  he  set  pen  to  paper.  His  imagination  was 
as  diligent  and  as  disciplined  as  his  pen.  Dickens's 
practice  in  this  matter  could  not  be  better  put  than 
in  his  own  words,  when  he  describes  himself  as  "  in 
the  first  stage  of  a  new  book,  which  consists  in 
going  round  and  round  the  idea,  as  you  see  a  bird 
in  its  cage  go  about  and  about  his  sugar  before  he 
touches  it."  That  his  plots  are  always  highly 
elaborated  is  the  fruit  of  this  preliminary  disciplined 
exercise  of  thought.  The  method  is  familiar  to 
many  novelists  now ;  Dickens  was  the  first  to  put 
it  into  practice.  In  the  second  place,  he  made  a 
new  departure  by  his  frankly  admitted  didacticism 
and  by  the  skill  with  which  in  all  but  two  or  three 
of  his  books — Bleak  House,  perhaps,  and  Little 
Dorrit — he  squared  his  purpose  with  his  art. 
Lastly,  he  made  the  discovery  which  has  made  him 
immortal.  In  him  for  the  first  time  the  English 
novel  produced  an  author  who  dug  down  into  the 
massesjrfjthe  people  forlns  subjects;  apprehended 
them  in  all  their  inexhaustible  character  and  humour 
and  pathos,  and  reproduced  them  with  a  lively  and 
loving  artistic  skill. 

Dickens  has,  of  course,  serious  faults.     In  par- 
ticular, readers  emancipated  by  lapse  of  time  from 


THE   NOVEL  281 

the    enslavement    of   the    first    enthusiasm    have 
quarrelled  with  the  mawkishness  and  sentimentality 


of  his  pathos,  and  with  the  exaggeration  of 
studies  of  character.  It  has  been~sardiof  him,  as 
it  has  of  Thackeray,  that  he  could  not  draw  a 
"  good  woman,"  and  that  Agnes  Copperfield,  like 
Amelia  Sedley.  is  a  very  doll-like  type  of  person. 
To  critics  of  this  kind  it  may  be  retorted  that 
though  "  good  "  and  "  bad  "  are  categories  relevant 
to  melodrama,  they  apply  very  ill  to  serious  fiction, 
and  that  indeed  to  the  characters  of  any  of  the 
novelists  —  the  Brontes,  Mrs  Gaskell,  or  the  like  — 
who  lay  bare  character  with  fullness  and  intimacy, 
they  could  not  well  be  applied  at  all.  The  faulti- 
ness  of  them  in  Dickens  is  less  than  in  Thackeray, 
for  in  Dickens  they  are  only  incident  to  the  scheme, 
which  lies  in  the  hero  (his  heroes  are  excellent)  and 
in  the  grotesque  characters,  whereas  in  his  rival 
they  are  in  the  theme  itself.  For  his  pathos,  not 
even  his  warmest  admirer  could  perhaps  offer  a 
satisfactory  case.  The  charge  of  exaggeration, 
however,  is  another  matter.  To  the  person  who 
complains  that  he  has  never  met  Dick  Swiveller 
or  Micawber  or  Mrs  Gamp  the  answer  is  simply 
Turner's  to  the  sceptical  critic  of  his  sunset,  "  Don't 
you  wish  you  could  ?  "  To  the  other,  who  objects 
more  plausibly  to  Dickens's  habit  of  attaching  to 
each  of  his  characters  some  label  which  is  either  so 
much  flaunted  all  through  that  you  cannot  see  the 
character  at  all,  or  else  mysteriously  and  unaccount- 


ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

ably  disappears  when  the  story  begins  to  grip  the 
author,  Dickens  has  himself  offered  an  amusing 
and  convincing  defence.  In  the  preface  to  Pick- 
wick he  answers  those  who  criticized  the  novel  on 
the  ground  that  Pickwick  began  by  being  purely 
ludicrous  and  developed  into  a  serious  and  sympa- 
thetic individuality,  by  pointing  to  the  analogous 
process  which  commonly  takes  place  in  actual 
human  relationships.  You  begin  a  new  acquaint- 
anceship with  perhaps  not  very  charitable  pre- 
possessions ;  these,  later,  a  deeper  and  better  know- 
ledge removes,  and  where  you  have  before  seen  an 
idiosyncrasy  you  come  to  love  a  character.  It  is 
ingenious,  and  it  helps  to  explain  Mrs  Nickleby, 
the  Pecksniff  daughters,  and  many  another. 
Whether  it  is  true  or  not  (and  it  does  not  explain 
the  poorness  of  such  pictures  as  Carker  and  his 
kind),  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  this  trick  in 
Dickens  of  beginning  with  a  salient  impression 
and  working  outward  to  a  fuller  conception  of 
character  is  part  at  least  of  the  reason  of  his 
enormous  hold  upon  his  readers.  No  man  leads 
you  into  the  mazes  of  his  invention  so  easily  and 
with  such  a  persuasive  hand. 

The  great  novelists  who  were  writing  con- 
temporarily with  him — the  Brontes,  Mrs  Gaskell, 
George  Eliot — it  is  impossible  to.  deal  with  here, 
except  to  say  that  the  last  seems,  because  of  her 
occasional  ir^Uity^g^j^^ 
ethics,  inferior  to  Mrs  Gaskell  or  to  either  of  the 


THE   NOVEL  283 

Bronte  sisters.  Nor  of  the  later  Victorians  who 
added  fresh  variety  to  the  national  style  can  the 
greatest,  Meredith,  be  more  than  mentioned  for 
the  exquisiteness  of  his  comic  spirit  and  the  brave 
gallery  of  English  men  and  women  he  has  given  us 
in  what  is,  perhaps,  fundamentally  the  most  English 
thing  in  fiction  since  Fielding  wrote.  For  our 
purpose  Mr__.Hsidy^  though  he  is  a  less  brilliant 
artist,  is  more  to  the  point.  His  novels  brought 
into  England  the  contemporary  pessimism  of 
Schopenhauer  and  the  Russians,  and  found  a  home 
for  it  among  the  English  peasantry.  Convinced 
that  in  the  upper  classes  character  could  be  studied 
and  portrayed  only  subjectively  because  of  the 
artificiality  of  a  society  which  prevented  its  outlet 
in  action,  he  turned  to  the  peasantry,  because  with 
them  conduct  is  the  direct  expression  of  the  inner 
life.  Character  could  be  shown  working,  therefore, 
not  subjectively  but  in  the  act,  if  you  chose  a 
peasant  subject.  His  philosophy,  expressed  in  this 
medium,  is  sombre.  In  his  novels  you  can  trace  a 
gradual  realization  of  the  defects  of  natural  laws 
and  the  quandary  men  are  put  to  by  their  opera- 
tion^^Kance,~an  irritating  and  trifling  series  of 
coincidences,  plays  the  part  of  fate.  Nature  seems 

X      .      V  J. 

to   enter  tfeith  .tfee   hopelessness   of  man's   mood. 

-^* 

Finally,  the  nbvdist  turns  against  life  itself. 
"Birth,"  he  says,  speaking  of  Tess,  "seemed  to 
her  an  ordeal  of  degrading  personal  compulsion 
whose  gratuitousness  ft&thing  in  the  result  seemed 


284  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

to  justify  and  at  best  could  only  palliate."  It  is 
strange  to  find  pessimism  in  a  romantic  setting ; 
strange,  too,  to  find  a  paganism  which  is  so  little 
capable  of  light  or  joy. 

(4) 

The  characteristic  form  of  English  fiction — that 
in  which  the  requisite  illusion  of  the  complexity 
and  variety  of  life  is  rendered  by  discursiveness,  by 
an  author's  licence  to  digress,  to  double  back  on 
himself,  to  start,  maybe,  in  the  middle  of  a  story 
and  work  subsequently  to  the  beginning  and  the 
end ;  in  short,  by  his  power  to  do  whatever  is  most 
expressive  of  his  individuality — found  a  rival  in  the 
last  twenty  years  of  the  nineteenth  century  in  the 
French  Naturalistic  or  Realist  school,  in  which  the 
illusion  of  life  is  got  by  a  studied  and  sober  veracity 
of  statement,  and  by  the  minute  accumulation  of 
detail.  To  the  French  Naturalists  a  novel  ap- 
proached in  importance  the  work  of  a  man  of 
science,  and  they  believed  it  ought  to  be  based 
on  documentary  evidence,  as  a  scientific  work 
would  be.  Above  all,  it  ought  not  to  allow  itself 
to  be  coloured  by  the  least  gloss  of  imagination  or 
idealism  ;  it  ought  never  to  shrink  from  a  confronta- 
tion of  the  naked  fact.  On  the  contrary,  it  was  its 
business  to  carry  it  to  the  dissecting  table  and  there 
minutely  examine  everything  that  lay  beneath  its 
surface. 

The  school  first  became  an  English  possession 


GEORGE  MEREDITH. 

From  the  portrait  by  Frank  Hollyer. 


THE  NOVEL  285 

in  the  early  translations  of  the  work  of  Zola ;  its 
methods  were  transplanted  into  English  fiction 
by  Mr  George  Moore.  From  his  novels,  both  in 
passages  of  direct  statement  and  in  the  light  of 
his  practice,  it  is  possible  to  gather  together  the 
materials  of  a  manifesto  of  the  English  Naturalistic 
school.  The  Naturalists  complained  that  English 
fiction  lacked  construction  in  the  strictest  sense ; 
they  found  in  the  English  novel  a  remarkable 
absence  of  organic  wholeness ;  it  did  not  fulfil 
their  first  and  broadest  canon  of  subject-matter 
—by  which  a  novel  has  to  deal,  in  the  first  place, 
with  a  single  and  rhythmical  series  of  events ;  it 
was  too  discursive.  They  made  this  charge  against 
English  fiction ;  they  also  retorted  the  charge 
brought  by  native  writers  and  their  readers  against 
the  French  of  foulness,  sordidness,  and  pessimism  in 
their  view  of  life.  "  We  do  not,"  says  a  novelist  in 
one  of  Mr  Moore's  books,  "  we  do  not  always  choose 
what  you  call  unpleasant  subjects,  but  we  do  try  to 
get  to  the  roots  of  things  ;  and  the  basis  of  life  being 
material  and  not  spiritual,  the  analyst  sooner  or  later 
finds  himself  invariably  handling  what  this  senti- 
mental age  calls  coarse."  "The  novel,"  says  the 
same  character,  "  if  it  be  anything,  is  contemporary 
history,  an  exact  and  complete  reproduction  of  the 
social  surroundings  of  the  age  we  live  in."  That 
succinctly  is  the  Naturalistic  theory  of  the  novel  as 
a  work  of  science — that  as  the  history  of  a  nation 
lies  hidden  often  in  social  wrongs  and  in  domestic 


286  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

grief  as  much  as  in  the  movements  of  parties  or 
dynasties,  the  novelist  must  do  for  the  former  what 
the  historian  does  for  the  latter.  It  is  his  business 
in  the  scheme  of  knowledge  of  his  time. 

But  the  Naturalists  believed  quite  as  profoundly 
in  the  novel  as  a  work  of  art.  They  claimed  for 
their  careful  pictures  of  the  grey  and  sad  and  sordid 
an  artistic  worth,  varying  in  proportion  to  the 
intensity  of  the  emotion  in  which  the  picture  was 
composed  and  according  to  the  picture's  truth,  but 
in  its  essence  just  as  real  and  permanent  as  the 
artistic  worth  of  romance.  "  Seen  from  afar," 
writes  Mr  Moore,  "  all  things  in  nature  are  of  equal 
worth ;  and  the  meanest  things,  when  viewed  with 
the  eyes  of  God,  are  raised  to  heights  of  tragic 
awe  which  conventionality  would  limit  to  the  deaths 
of  kings  and  patriots."  On  such  a  lofty  theory 
they  built  their  treatment  and  their  style.  It  is  a 
mistake  to  suppose  that  the  Realist  school  deliber- 
ately cultivates  the  sordid  or  shocking.  Examine 
in  this  connection  Mr  Moore's  Mummer  s  Wife, 
one  of  our  great  English  Realist  novels,  and,  for  the 
matter  of  that,  one  of  the  fine  things  in  English 
fiction,  and  you  will  see  that  the  scrupulous  fidelity 
of  the  author's  method,  though  it  denies  him  those 
concessions  to  a  sentimentalist  or  romantic  view  of 
life  which  are  the  common  implements  of  fiction, 
denies  him  no  less  the  extremities  of  horror  or 
loathsomeness.  The  heroine  sinks  into  the  miser- 
able squalor  of  a  dipsomaniac  and  dies  from  a 


THE   NOVEL  287 

drunkard's  disease,  but  her  end  is  shown  as  the 
ineluctable  consequence  of  her  life — its  early  grey- 
ness  and  monotony,  the  sudden  shock  of  a  new  and 
strange  environment,  and  the  resultant  weakness  of 
will  which  a  morbid  excitability  inevitably  brought 
about.     The   novel,   that   is   to  say,  deals  with  a 
"  rhythmical  series  of  events  and  follows  them  to 
their  conclusion " ;  it  gets  at  the  roots  of  things  ; 
it   tells   us   of  something  which  we  know  to  be 
true  in  life  whether  we  care  to  read  it  in  fiction  or 
not.     There  is  nothing  in  it  of  sordidness  for  sordid- 
ness'  sake,  nor  have  the  Realists  any  philosophy 
of  an  unhappy  ending.     In  this  case  the  ending  is 
unhappy  because  the  sequence  of  events  admitted 
of  no  other  solution ;  in  others  the  ending  is  happy 
or  merely  neutral  as  the  preceding  story  decides. 
If  what  one  may  call  neutral  endings  predominate, 
it  is  because  they  also — notoriously — predominate 
in  life.     But  the   question  of  unhappiness  or  its 
opposite   has   nothing    whatever   to   do   with   the 
larger  matter  of  beauty ;  it  is  the  triumph  of  the 
Realists  that  at  their  best  they  discovered  a  new 
beauty  in  things,  the  loveliness  that  lies  in  obscure 
places,  the  splendour  of  sordidness,  humility,  and 
pain.     They  have  taught  us  that  beauty,  like  the 
Spirit,  blows  where  it  lists,  and  we  know  from  them 
that  the  antithesis  between  realism  and  idealism  is 
only  on  their  lower  levels ;  at  their  summits  they 
unite   and  are   one.     No  true   Realist   but   is   an 
idealist  too. 


288  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Most  of  what  is  best  in  English  fiction  since  has 
been  directly  occasioned  by  their  work ;  Gissing 
and  Mr  Arnold  Bennett  may  be  mentioned  as  two 
authors  who  are  fundamentally  Realist  in  their  con- 
ception of  the  art  of  the  novel,  and  the  Realist  ideal 
partakes  in  a  greater  or  less  degree  in  the  work 
of  nearly  all  our  eminent  novelists  to-day.  But 
realism  is  not  and  cannot  be  interesting  to  the  great 
public  ;  it  portrays  people  as  they  are,  not  as  they 
would  like  to  be,  and  where  they  are,  not  where 
they  would  like  to  be.  It  gives  no  background 
for  day-dreaming.  Now,  literature  (to  repeat  what 
has  been  more  than  once  stated  earlier  in  this 
book)  is  a  way  of  escape  from  life  as  well  as  an 
echo  or  mirror  of  it,  and  the  novel,  as  the  form  of 
literature  which  more  than  any  other  men  read 
for  pleasure,  is  the  main  avenue  for  this  escape. 
So  that  alongside  this  invasion  of  Realism  it  is  not 
strange  that  there  grew  a  revival  in  romance. 

The  main  agent  of  it,  Robert  Louis  Stevenson, 
had  the  romantic  strain  in  him  intensified  by  the 
conditions  under  which  he  worked  ;  a  weak  and 
anaemic  man,  he  loved  bloodshed  as  a  cripple 
loves  athletics — passionately  and  with  the  intimate 
enthusiasm  of  make-believe  which  an  imaginative 
man  can  bring  to  bear  on  the  contemplation  of 
what  can  never  be  his.  His  natural  attraction 
for  "  redness  and  juice  "  in  life  was  seconded  by  a 
delightful  and  fantastic  sense  of  the  boundless 
possibilities  of  romance  in  everyday  things.  To 


THE   NOVEL  289 

a  Realist  a  hansom-cab  driver  is  a  man  who  makes 
twenty-five  shillings  a  week,  lives  in  a  back  street 
in  Pimlico,  has  a  wife  who  drinks  and  children 
who  grow  up  with  an  alcoholic  taint ;  the  Realist 
will  compare  his  lot  with  other  cab-drivers,  and 
find  what  part  of  his  life  is  the  product  of  the  cab- 
driving  environment,  and  on  that  basis  he  will 
write  his  book.  To  Stevenson  and  to  the  Roman- 
ticist generally,  a  hansom- cab  driver  is  a  mystery 
behind  whose  apparent  commonplaceness  lie  magic 
possibilities  beyond  all  telling;  not  one  but  may 
be  the  agent  of  the  Prince  of  Bohemia,  ready 
to  drive  you  off  to  some  mad  and  magic  adven- 
ture in  a  street  which  is  just  as  commonplace  to 
the  outward  eye  as  the  cab-driver  himself,  but 
which  implicates  by  its  very  deceitful  commonness 
whole  volumes  of  romance.  The  novel-reader  to 
whom  Demos  was  the  repetition  of  what  he  had 
seen  and  known  and  what  had  planted  sickness 
in  his  soul,  found  the  New  Arabian  Nights  a 
refreshing  miracle.  Stevenson  had  discovered 
that  modern  London  had  its  possibilities  of 
romance.  To  these  two  elements  of  his  romantic 
equipment  must  be  added  a  third — travel.  Defoe 
never  left  England,  and  other  early~Romanticists 
less  gifted  with  invention  than  he  wrote  from  the 
mind's  eye  and  from  books.  To  Stevenson,  and 
to  his  successor  Mr  Kipling,  whose  "discovery" 
of  India  is  one  of  theHsalient  facts  of  modern 

English  letters,  and   to   Mr  Conrad   belongs   the 

iy 


290  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

credit  of  teaching  novelists  to  draw  on  experience 
for  the  scenes  they  seek  to  presentr~~7t~~fourth 
element  in  the  equipment  of  modern  Romanticism 
— that  which  draws  its  effects  from  the  "  miracles  " 
of  modern  science — has  been  added  by  j\lr_Wells, 
in  whose  work  the  Realist  and  Romantic_schools 
seem  finally  to  have  united. 

It  was  not  till  towards  the  end  of  the  nineteenth 
century  that  one  of  the  oldest  and  most  popular 
forms  of  fiction,  that  of  the  short  story,  came  to 
its  own  in  our  literature.  Most  of  the  novels 
of  the  Renaissance  were  short  stories  in  the  literal 
sense  of  the  word,  but  into  their  brief  compass 
they  compressed  a  narrative  which  might  well 
have  served  to  eke  out  a  long  book,  and  when 
the  short  story  was  revived  in  the  nineteenth 
century  it  made  no  attempt  to  follow  this  older 
plan.  Commonly  it  sought  simply  to  describe  an 
incident  or  sketch  a  character,  or  perhaps  even 
only  to  suggest  some  single  emotional  or  pictorial 
effect.  "I  found,"  sayiTMTWells,  ^ThaFtaking 
almost  anything  as  a  starting-point  and  letting  my 
thoughts  play  about  it,  there  would  presently  come 
out  of  the  darkness  in  a  manner  quite  inexplicable 
some  absurd  or  vivid  little  incident  more  or  less 
relevant  to  that  initial  nucleus.  Little  men  in 
canoes  upon  sunlit  oceans  would  come  floating 
out  of  nothingness,  incubating  the  eggs  of  pre- 
historic monsters  unawares ;  violent  conflicts 
would  break  out  amidst  the  flower-beds  of 


THE   NOVEL  291 

suburban  gardens ;  I  would  discover  I  was  peer- 
ing into  remote  and  mysterious  worlds,  ruled  by 
an  order  logical  indeed,  but  other  than  our  common 
sanity."  That  is  the  explanation  of  the  making  of 
one  kind  of  short  story — simply  the  art  of  making 
something  very  bright  and  moving,  having  this 
in  common  with  the  short  stories  of  an  earlier  day, 
that  it  should  not  be  longer  than  can  conveniently 
in  a  short  space  of  time  be  read  aloud,  but  making 
no  attempt  as  they  did  to  state  whole  histories  in 
the  fraction  of  an  hour.  This  new  mode  of  short 
story,  learnt  perhaps  from  France,  caught  the 
imagination  of  English  writers,  and  in  no  form  of 
fiction  is  English  literature  in  these  later  days 
more  rich. 


CHAPTER   X 

CONTEMPORARIES 

How  can  we  who  are  contemporaries  tell  whether 
an  author's  work  is  permanent  or  no  ?  It  is  easy 
to  find  excuses  for  making  a  survey  of  English 
literature  stop  short  of  writers  who  are  still  work- 
ing. The  easiest  and  quickest  stated  is  that  one 
is  anticipating  the  verdict  of  posterity.  Of  course, 
in  a  sense,  the  point  of  view  expressed  by  the 
question  is  true  enough.  It  is  always  idle  to 
anticipate  the  verdict  of  posterity.  Remember 
Matthew  Arnold's  prophecy  that  at  the  end  of  the 
nineteenth  century  Wordsworth  and  Byron  would 
be  the  two  great  names  in  romantic  poetry.  We 
are  fourteen  years  past  that  date  now,  and  so 
far  as  Byron  is  concerned,  at  any  rate,  there  is 
no  sign  that  Arnold's  prediction  has  come  true. 
But  the  obvious  fact  that  we  cannot  do  our  grand- 
children's thinking  for  them,  is  no  reason  why  we 
should  refuse  to  think  for  ourselves.  No  notion 
is  so  destructive  to  the  formation  of  a  sound  literary 
taste  as  the  notion  that  books  become  literature 
only  when  their  authors  are  dead.  Round  us  men 
and  women  are  putting  into  plays  and  poetry  and 


292 


CONTEMPORARIES  293 

novels  the  best  that  they  can  or  know.  They  are 
writing  not  for  a  dim  and  uncertain  future,  but 
for  us,  and  on  our  recognition  and  welcome  they 
depend,  sometimes  for  their  livelihood,  always  for 
the  courage  which  carries  them  on  to  fresh 
endeavour.  Literature  is  an  ever-living  and  con- 
tinuous thing,  and  we  do  it  less  than  its  due  service 
if  we  are  so  occupied  reading  Shakespeare  and 
Milton  and  Scott  that  we  have  no  time  to  read 
Mr  Yeats,  Mr  Masefield,  Mr  Shaw,  or  Mr  Wells. 
Students  of  literature  must  remember  that  classics 
are  being  manufactured  daily  under  their  eyes,  and 
that  on  their  sympathy  and  comprehension  depends 
whether  an  author  receives  the  success  he  merits 
when  he  is  alive  to  enjoy  it. 

The  purpose  of  this  chapter,  then,  is  to  indicate 
some  characteristics  of  the  general  trend  or  drift 
of  literary  effort  as  a  whole,  and  to  give  a  rough 
picture  of  some  of  the  lines  or  schools  of  con- 
temporary art.  The  most  remarkable  literary 
feature  of  the  age  is  without  doubt  its  comparative 
inattention  to  poetry.  Tennyson  was  a  popular 
author ;  his  books  sold  in  thousands ;  his  lines 
passed  into  that  common  conversational  currency 
of  unconscious  quotation  which  is  the  surest 
testimony  to  the  permeation  of  a  poet's  influence. 
Even  Browning,  though  his  popularity  came  late, 
found  himself  carried  into  all  the  nooks  and  corners 
of  the  reading  public.  His  robust  and  masculine 
morality,  understood  at  last,  or  expounded  by 


ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

a  semi-priestly  class  of  interpreters,  made  him 
popular  with  those  readers — and  they  are  the 
majority  —  who  love  their  reading  to  convey  a 
moral  lesson,  just  as  Tennyson's  reflection  of  his 
time's  distraction  between  science  and  religion 
endeared  them  to  those  who  found  in  him  an 
answer,  or  at  least  an  echo,  to  their  own  perplexities. 
A  work  widely  different  from  either  of  these,  Fitz- 
Gerald's  Rubdiydt  of  Omar  Khayyam,  shared  and 
has  probably  exceeded  their  popularity  for  similar 
reasons.  Its  easy  pessimism  and  cult  of  pleasure, 
its  delightful  freedom  from  any  demand  for  con- 
tinuous thought  from  its  readers,  its  appeal  to  the 
indolence  and  moral  flaccidity  which  is  implicit 
in  all  men,  all  contributed  to  its  immense  vogue ; 
and  among  people  who  perhaps  did  not  fully 
understand  it,  but  were  merely  lulled  by  its  son 
orousness,  a  knowledge  of  it  has  passed  for  the 
insignia  of  a  love  of  literature  and  the  possession 
of  literary  taste.  But  after  FitzGerald — who? 
What  poet  has  commanded  the  ear  of  the  reading 
public  or  even  a  fraction  of  it  ?  Not  Swinburne 
certainly,  partly  because  of  his  undoubted  difficulty, 
partly  because  of  a  suspicion  held  of  his  moral  and 
religious  tenets,  largely  from  material  reasons  quite 
unconnected  with  the  quality  of  his  work ;  not 
Morris,  nor  his  followers ;  none  as  yet,  unless  it 
be  Mr  Masefield,  of  the  younger  school.  Probably 
the  only  writer  of  verse  who  is  at  the  same  time  a 
poet  and  has  acquired  a  large  popularity  and  public 


CONTEMPORARIES  295 

influence  is  Mr  Kipling.  His  work  as  a  novelist 
we  mentioned  in  the  last  chapter.  It  remains  to 
say  something  of  his  achievements  in  verse. 

Let  us  grant  at  once  his  faults.  He  can  be 
violent,  and  over-rhetorical ;  he  belabours  you  with 
sense  impressions,  and  with  the  polysyllabic  rhetoric 
he  learned  from  Swinburne — and  he  is  sometimes 
deficient,  though  rarely,  in  the  finer  shades  of  taste. 
But  these  things  do  not  affect  the  main  greatness 
of  his  work.  He  is  great  because  he  discovered  not 
only  a  new  method  but  a  new  subject-matter,  and 
because  of  the  white-heat  of  imagination  which  in  his 
best  things  he  brought  to  bear  on  it  and  by  which 
he  transfused  it  into  poetry.  It  is  Mr  Kipling's 
special  distinction  that  the  apparatus  of  modern 
civilization — steam  engines,  and  steamships,  and 
telegraph  lines,  and  the  art  of  flight — take  on  in 
his  hands  a  poetic  quality  as  authentic  and  inspiring 
as  any  that  ever  was  cast  over  the  implements  of 
other  and  what  the  mass  of  men  believe  to  have 
been  more  picturesque  days.  Romance  is  in  the 
present,  so  he  teaches  us,  as  well  as  in  the  past,  and 
we  do  it  wrong  to  leave  it  only  the  territory  we 
have  ourselves  discarded  in  the  advance  of  the 
race.  That  and  the  great  discovery  of  India — an 
India  coloured  by  his  own  prejudices,  no  doubt, 
but  still  the  first  presentment  of  an  essential  fact 
in  our  modern  history  as  a  people — give  him  the 
hold  that  he  has,  and  rightly,  over  the  minds  of 
his  readers. 


296  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

But  though  from  the  death  of  Tennyson  until 
no  more  than  a  year  or  two  ago  the  English- 
speaking  peoples  have  been  inattentive  to  poetry, 
English  poetry  has  gone  on,  a  steady  and  unabated 
stream.  Most  of  it,  perhaps,  has  been  heard  of 
rather  than  heard,  and  it  is  not  until  the  narrative 
poems  of  Mr  Masefield,  so  recently  published  that 
they  belong  rather  to  the  reviewer  than  to  the 
literary  historian,  that  any  poetry  of  the  best 
quality  in  thought  and  writing  can  be  said  to  have 
caught  the  general  ear.  When  Tennyson  died  he 
left  two  followers,  neither  closely  imitative,  but 
each,  whatever  his  differences  of  outlook  upon  his 
art  and  the  world,  imbued  with  what  may  be  called 
the  Tennysonian  spirit.  Mr  William  Watson, 
making  himself  the  laureate  of  the  Liberal  spirit, 
and  so  taking  up  a  work  which  Swinburne  laid 
down,  has  invested  with  unfailing  gravity  and 
dignity  his  verses  on  political  themes,  and,  return- 
ing to  an  eighteenth-century  habit,  he  has  used 
poetry  to  criticise  poetry  with  both  finish  and 
sureness  of  touch.  The  other  follower  of  Tenny- 
son, Mr  Bridges,  with  not  less  learning  and  certainly 
more  learned  curiosity  in  metrical  experiment,  has 
perhaps  more  spontaneity,  more  of  the  stuff  of 
poetry,  and  a  fuller  measure  of  the  English  spirit 
in  his  verse. 

It  is  not  with  these,  however — still  less  with  Mr 
Kipling — that  the  main  stream  of  English  romantic 
poetry  flows.  The  younger  poets  of  the  nineties 


CONTEMPORARIES  297 

belonged,  more  or  less,  all  to  one  school — the  school 
which  had  its  origin  in  England  in  the  work  of 
William  Blake,  but  more,  perhaps,  in  contemporary 
France  in  the  writings  of  Baudelaire  and  Verlaine. 
Much  of  their  work  was  imitative  and  none  of  it 
perhaps  very  profound,  but  each  of  them — Ernest 
Dowson  and  Lionel  Johnson,  who  are  both  now  dead, 
and  others  who  are  still  living — produced  enough 
to  show  that  they  had  at  their  command  a  vein  of 
poetry  that  might  have  deepened  and  proved  richer 
had  they  gone  on  working  it.  One  of  them,  Mr 
W.  B.  Yeats,  by  his  birth  and  his  reading  in  Irish 
legend  and  folklore,  which  was  being  collected 
during  his  youth  by  a  few  devoted  students,  became 
possessed  of  a  subject-matter  denied  to  his  fellows, 
and  it  is  from  the  combination  of  the  mood  of  the 
decadents  with  the  dreaminess  and  mystery  of 
Celtic  tradition  and  romance — a  combination  which 
came  to  pass  in  his  poetry — that  the  Celtic  school 
has  sprung.  In  a  sense,  it  has  added  to  the  terri- 
tory explored  by  Coleridge  and  Scott  and  Morris 
a  new  province.  Only,  nothing  could  be  further 
from  the  objectivity  of  these  men  than  the  way  in 
which  the  Celtic  school  approaches  its  material. 
Its  stories  are  clear  to  itself,  it  may  be,  but  not  to 
its  readers.  Deirdre  and  Conchubar,  and  Angus 
and  Maeve  and  Dectora,  and  all  the  shadowy 
figures  in  them,  scarcely  become  embodied.  Their 
lives  and  deaths  and  loves  and  hates  are  only  a 
scheme  on  which  they  weave  a  delicate  and  dim 


298  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

embroidery  of  pure  poetry — of  love  and  death  and 
old  age  and  the  passing  of  beauty  and  all  the 
sorrows  that  have  been  since  the  world  began  and 
will  be  till  the  world  ends.  If  Mr  Kipling  is  of 
the  earth  earthy,  if  the  clangour  and  rush  of  the 
world  is  in  everything  he  writes,  Mr  Yeats  and  his 
school  live  consciously  sequestered  and  withdrawn, 
and  the  world  never  breaks  in  on  their  ghostly 
troubles  or  their  peace.  Poetry  never  fails  to 
relate  itself  to  its  age ;  if  it  is  not  with  it,  it  is 
against  it ;  it  is  never  merely  indifferent.  The 
poetry  of  these  men  is  the  denial,  passionately 
made,  of  everything  the  world  prizes.  When  such 
a  denial  is  sincere,  as  in  the  best  of  them,  then  the 
verses  they  make  are  true  and  fine.  When  it 
assumed,  as  in  some  of  their  imitators,  then  t 
work  they  did  is  not  true  poetry.  But  it  would  be 
no  (or  only  a  little)  more  than  the  truth  to  say 
that  at  no  period  in  the  past  was  English  poetry 
more  full  of  promise  than  it  is  at  the  present 
moment. 

But  the  literary  characteristic  of  the  present  age 
—the  one  which  is  most  likely  to  differentiate  it 
from  its  predecessor — is  the  revival  of  the  drama. 
When  we  left  it  before  the  Commonwealth  the 
great  English  literary  school  of  playwriting — the 
romantic  drama — was  already  dead.  It  has  had 
since  no  second  birth.  There  followed  after  it  the 
heroic  tragedy  of  Dryden  and  Shad  well,  a  turgid, 
declamatory  form  of  art  without  importance ;  a 


: 


CONTEMPORARIES  299 

two  brilliant  comic  periods — the  earlier  and  greater 
that  of  Congreve  and  Wycherley :  the  later,  more 
sentimental,  with  less  art  and  vivacity,  that  of 
Goldsmith  and  Sheridan.  With  Sheridan  the 
drama  as  a  literary  force  died  a  second  time.  It 
has  been  born  again  only  in  our  own  day.  It  is, 
of  course,  unnecessary  to  point  out  that  the  writing 
of  plays  did  not  cease  in  the  interval ;  it  never  does 
cease.  The  production  of  dramatic  journey-work 
has  been  continuous  since  the  reopening  of  the 
theatres  in  1660,  and  it  is  carried  on  as  plentifully 
as  ever  at  this  present  time.  Only,  side  by  side 
with  it  there  has  grown  up  a  new  literary  drama, 
and  gradually  the  main  stream  of  artistic  endeavour, 
which  for  nearly  a  century  has  preoccupied  itself 
with  the  novel  almost  to  the  exclusion  of  other 
forms  of  art,  has  turned  back  to  the  stage  as  its 
channel  to  articulation  and  an  audience.  An  in- 
fluence from  abroad  set  it  in  motion.  The  plays 
of  Ibsen — produced,  the  best  of  them,  in  the 
eighties  of  last  century — came  to  England  in  the 
nineties.  In  a  way,  perhaps,  they  were  misunder- 
stood by  their  worshippers  hardly  less  than  by  their 
enemies ;  but  all  excrescences  of  enthusiasm  apart, 
they  taught  men  a  new  and  freer  approach  to 
moral  questions,  and  a  new  and  freer  dramatic 
technique.  Where  plays  had  been  constructed  on 
a  journeyman  plan  evolved  by  Labiche  and  Sardou 
—mid-nineteenth-century  writers  in  France — a 
plan  delighting  in  symmetry,  close-jointedness, 


300  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

false  correspondences,  an  impossible  use  of  coinci-| 
dence,  and  a  quite  unreal  complexity  and  elabora-| 
tion,  they  become  bolder  and  less  artificial,  more|( 
close  to  the  likelihoods  of  real  life.     The  gravity  of  | 
the   problems  with  which  they  set   themselves  to.r 
deal  heightened  their  influence.     In  England  men  I 
began  to  ask  themselves  whether  the  theatre  heref 
too  could  not  be  made  an  avenue  towards  the  dis- 1 
cussion   of  living  difficulties ;   and  then  arose  the  j 
new  school  of  dramatists — of  whom  the  first  and| 
most   remarkable   is    Mr   George   Bernard   Shaw.  II 
In  his  earlier  plays  he  set  himself  boldly  to  attack 
established  conventions,  and  to  ask  his  audiences! 
to  think  for  themselves.     Arms  and  the  Man  dealt! 
\l    a  blow  at  the  cheap   romanticism   with   which   at 
peace-living  public  invests  the  profession  of  arms  ; 
The  Devil's  Disciple  was  a  shrewd  criticism  of  the  | 
preposterous   self-sacrifice   on    which    melodrama, 
which  is   the   most   popular   non-literary  form   of 
play- writing,  is   commonly  based ;  Mrs  Warrens\ 
Profession  made  a  brave  and  plain-spoken  attempt 
to  drag  the  public  face  to  face  with  the  nauseous 
realities   of  prostitution ;     Widowers'  Houses   laid 
bare  the  sordidness  of  a  society  which  bases  itself  I 
on  the  exploitation  of  the  poor  for  the  luxuries  of ' 
the  rich.     It  took  Mr  Shaw  close  on  ten  yeass  to 
persuade  even  the  moderate  number  of  men  and 
women  who  make  up  a  theatre  audience  that  his 
plays  were  worth  listening  to.     But  before  his  final 
success  came  he  had  attained  a  substantial  popu- 


CONTEMPORARIES  301 

prity  with  the  public  which  reads.  Possibly  his 
jarly  failure  on  the  stage — mainly  due  to  the 
bstinacy  of  playgoers  immersed  in  a  stock  tradi- 
on — was  partly  due  also  to  his  failure  in  con- 
ructive  power.  He  is  an  adept  at  tying  knots 
nd  impatient  of  unravelling  them ;  his  third  acts 
re  apt  either  to  evaporate  in  talk  or  to  find  some 
nreal  and  unsatisfactory  solution  for  the  com- 
iexity  he  has  created.  But  constructive  weakness 
3art,  his  amazing  brilliance  and  fecundity  of 
ialogue  ought  to  have  given  him  an  immediate 
nd  lasting  grip  of  the  stage.  There  has  probably 
ever  been  a  dramatist  who  could  invest  conversa- 
on  with  the  same  vivacity  and  point,  the  same 
ombination  of  surprise  and  inevitableness,  that 
istinguishes  his  best  work. 

Alongside  of  Mr  Shaw,  more  immediately  success- 
ul,  and  not  traceable  to  any  obvious  influence, 
English  or  foreign,  came  the  comedies  of  Oscar 
A^ilde.  For  a  parallel  to  their  pure  delight  and 
igh  spirits,  and  to  the  exquisite  wit  and  artifice 
vith  which  they  were  constructed,  one  would  have 
o  go  back  to  the  dramatists  of  the  Restoration, 
'o  Congreve  and  his  school,  indeed,  Wilde  belongs 
ather  than  to  any  later  period.  With  his  own  age 
e  had  little  in  common ;  he  was  without  interest 

its  social  and  moral  problems  ;  when  he  approved 
f  socialism  it  was  because  in  a  socialist  state  the 
rtist  might  be  absolved  from  the  necessity  of  earn- 
ng  a  living,  and  be  free  to  follow  his  art  undisturbed 


302  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

He  loved  to  think  of  himself  as  symbolic,  but  all 
he  symbolized  was  a  fantasy  of  his  own  creating ; 
his  attitude  to  his  age  was  decorative  and  with- 
drawn rather  than  representative.  He  was  the 
licensed  jester  to  society,  and  in  that  capacity  he 
gave  us  his  plays.  Mr  Shaw  may  be  said  to  have 
founded  a  school ;  at  any  rate  he  gave  the  start 
to  Mr  Galsworthy  and  some  lesser  dramatists,  and 
taught  novelists  to  try  their  luck  on  the  stage. 
Wilde  founded  nothing,  and  his  works  remain  as 
complete  and  separate  as  those  of  the  earlier  artificial 
dramatists  of  two  centuries  before. 

Another  school  of  drama,  homogeneous  and  quite 
apart  from  the  rest,  remains.  We  have  seen  how 
the  "  Celtic  Revival,"  as  the  Irish  literary  move- 
ment has  been  called  by  its  admirers,  gave  us  a  new 
kind  of  romantic  poetry.  As  an  offshoot  from  it 
there  came  into  being  some  ten  years  ago  an  Irish 
school  of  drama,  drawing  its  inspiration  from  two 
sources — the  body  of  the  old  Irish  legends  and  the 
highly  individualized  and  richly  coloured  life  of  the 
Irish  peasants  in  the  mountains  of  Wicklow  and  of 
the  West,  a  life,  so  the  dramatists  believed,  still  un- 
spoiled by  the  cheapening  influences  of  a  false  system 
of  education  and  the  wear  and  tear  of  a  civilization 
whose  values  are  commercial  and  not  spiritual  or 
artistic.  The  school  founded  its  own  theatre,  trained 
its  own  actors,  fashioned  its  own  modes  of  speech 
(the  chief  of  which  was  a  frank  restoration  of 
rhythm  in  the  speaking  of  verse  and  of  cadence 


CONTEMPORARIES  503 

in  prose),  and,  having  all  these  things,  it  produced  a 
series  of  plays  all  directed  to  its  special  ends,  and 
all  composed  and  written  with  a  special  fidelity  to 
country  life  as  it  has  been  preserved,  or  to  what  it 
conceived  to  be  the  spirit  of  Irish  folk-legend.  It 
reached  its  zenith  quickly,  and,  as  far  as  the  pro- 
duction of  plays  is  concerned,  it  would  seem  to  be 
already  in  its  decline.  That  is  to  say,  what  in  the 
beginning  was  a  fresh  and  vivid  inspiration  caught 
direct  from  life,  has  become  a  pattern  whose  colours 
and  shape  can  be  repeated  or  varied  by  lesser 
writers  who  take  their  teaching  from  the  original 
discoverers.  But  in  the  course  of  its  brief  and 
striking  course  it  produced  one  great  dramatist— 
a  writer  whom  already,  not  three  years  after  his 
death,  men  instinctively  class  with  the  masters  of 
his  art. 

J.  M.  Synge,  in  the  earlier  years  of  his  manhood, 
lived  entirely  abroad,  leading  the  life  of  a  wander- 
ing scholar  from  city  to  city  and  country  to  country 
till  he  was  persuaded  to  give  up  the  Continent  and 
the  criticism  and  imitation  of  French  literature,  to 
return  to  England,  and  to  go  and  live  on  the  Aran 
Islands.  From  that  time  till  his  death — some  ten 
years — he  spent  a  large  part  of  each  year  amongst 
the  peasantry  of  the  desolate  Atlantic  coast  and 
wrote  the  plays  by  which  his  name  is  known.  His 
literary  output  was  not  large,  but  he  supplied  the 
Irish  dramatic  movement  with  exactly  what  it 
needed— a  vivid  contact  with  the  realities  of  life. 


804  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

Not  that  he  was  a  mere  student  or  transcriber  of 
manners.  His  wandering  life  among  many  peoples 
and  his  study  of  classical  French  and  German 
literature  had  equipped  him  as  perhaps  no  other 
modern  dramatist  has  been  equipped  with  an 
imaginative  insight  and  a  reach  of  perception 
which  enabled  him  to  give  universality  and  depth 
to  his  portrayal  of  the  peasant  types  around  him. 
He  got  down  to  the  great  elemental  forces  which 
throb  and  pulse  beneath  the  common  crises  of 
everyday  life,  and  laid  them  bare,  not  as  ugly  and 
horrible,  but  with  a  sense  of  their  terror,  their 
beauty,  and  their  strength.  His  earliest  play,  The 
Well  of  the  Saints,  treats  of  a  sorrow  that  is  as  old 
as  Helen,  of  the  vanishing  of  beauty  and  the  irony 
of  fulfilled  desire.  The  great  realities  of  death 
pass  through  the  Riders  to  the  Sea,  till  the  language 
takes  on  a  kind  of  simplicity  as  of  written  words 
shrivelling  up  in  a  flame.  The  Playboy  of  the 
Western  World  is  a  study  of  character,  terrible 
in  its  clarity,  but  never  losing  the  savour  of 
imagination  and  of  the  astringency  and  saltness 
that  was  characteristic  of  his  temper.  He  had  at 
his  command  an  instrument  of  incomparable  fine- 
ness and  range  in  the  language  which  he  fashioned 
out  the  speech  of  the  common  people  amongst 
whom  he  lived.  In  his  dramatic  writings  this 
language  took  on  a  kind  of  rhythm  which  had 
the  effect  of  producing  a  certain  remoteness  of 
the  highest  possible  artistic  value.  The  people 


CONTEMPORARIES  805 

of  his  imagination  appear  a  little  disembodied. 
They  talk  with  that  straightforward  and  simple 
kind  of  innocency  which  makes  strange  and  im- 
pressive the  dialogue  of  Maeterlinck's  earlier  plays. 
Through  it,  as  Mr  Yeats  has  said,  he  saw  the 
subject-matter  of  his  art  "  with  wise,  clear-seeing, 
unreflecting  eyes — and  he  preserved  the  innocence 
of  good  art  in  an  age  of  reasons  and  purposes." 
He  had  no  theory  except  of  his  art ;  no  "  ideas  " 
and  no  "problems";  he  did  not  wish  to  change 
anything  or  to  reform  anything  ;  but  he  saw  all 
his  people  pass  by  as  before  a  window,  and  he 
heard  their  words.  This  resolute  refusal  to  be 
interested  in  or  to  take  account  of  current  modes 
of  thought  has  been  considered  by  some  to  detract 
from  his  eminence.  Certainly,  if  by  "  ideas  "  we 
mean  current  views  on  society  or  morality,  he  is 
deficient  in  them ;  only,  his  very  deficiency  brings 
him  nearer  to  the  great  masters  of  drama — to  Ben 
Jonson,  to  Cervantes,  to  Moliere,  even  to  Shake- 
speare himself.  Probably  in  no  single  case  amongst 
our  contemporaries  could  a  high  and  permanent 
place  in  literature  be  prophesied  with  more  con- 
fidence than  in  his. 

In  the  past  it  has  seemed  impossible  for  fiction 
and  the  drama,  i.e.  serious  drama  of  high  literary 
quality,  to  flourish  side  by  side.  It  seems  as 
though  the  best  creative  minds  in  any  age  could 
find  strength  for  any  one  of  these  two  great  out- 
lets for  the  activity  of  the  creative  imagination. 

20 


306  ENGLISH   LITERATURE 

In  the  reign  of  Elizabeth  the  drama  outshone 
fiction  ;  in  the  reign  of  Victoria  the  novel  crowded 
out  the  drama.  There  are  signs  that  a  literary  era 
is  beginning  in  which  the  drama  will  regain  to 
the  full  its  position  as  a  literature.  More  and  more 
the  bigger  creative  artists  will  turn  to  a  form  which 
by  its  economy  of  means  to  ends,  and  the  chance 
it  gives  not  merely  of  observing  but  of  creating 
and  displaying  character  in  action,  has  a  more 
vigorous  principle  of  life  in  it  than  its  rival. 


INDEX 


Absalom  and  Achitophel,  155. 
Addison,  Joseph,    146,    161,   170, 

171,232,263. 

Advancement  of  Learning^  130. 
Anatomy  of  Abuses,  33. 
A  natomy  of  Melancholy -,  131-2. 
Annus  Mirabilis,  155. 
Antonio  and  Me  Hi  da,  95. 
Apology  or  Poetry,  49,  70. 
Arcadia,  49,  51,  68,  70. 
Arms  and  the  Man,  300. 
Arnold,  Matthew,  251,  254. 
Art  criticism,  216. 
Ascham,  Roger,  28,  31,  33. 
Astrea  Reddux,  155. 
Astrophel  and  Stella,  49-5 1. 
Atheist's  Tragedy,  87,  98. 
Aubrey,  John,  no. 
Augustan  Age,  the,  143. 
Austen,  Miss,  276-7. 
Autobiography,  1 10,  262,  264. 
Autobiographical  novel,  264,  268. 

Bacon,  Francis,  125,  128-131. 

Bacon's  Essays,  1 29. 

Bagehot,  Walter,  241. 

Ballad  literature,  19-24. 

Beaumont,  Francis,  99,  ioo. 

Bennett,  Arnold,  288. 

Bible,  the,  126-8. 

Biography,  no,  262. 

Blake,  William,  200-3. 

Blank  verse,  43,  44,  9°,  JI5- 

Boccaccio,  8,  9,  10. 

Boswell,    James,   i75>    i?8,   191* 

192. 

Bridges,  Robert,  296. 
Brontes,  the,  282. 
Browne,  Sir  Thomas,    118,    132, 

232. 

Browning,  Robert,  121,  241,  247. 
Buckhurst,  Lord,  45. 
Bunyan,  John,  264. 


Burke,  Edmund,  128,  182-6. 
Burns,  Robert,  195-200. 
Burton,  Robert,  131. 
Byron,  Lord,  215,  216,  229,  230. 

Carew,  Thomas,  125. 
Carlyle,  Thomas,  254-9. 
Castle  of  Indolence,  162. 
Celtic  Revival,  302. 
Character-writing,  in,  262. 
Chatterton,  Thomas,  211. 
Chaucer,  Geoffrey,  1-15,   17,   19, 

24. 

contemporaries  of,  13. 
Cheke,  Sir  John,  28,  29,  31. 
Childe  Harold,  230. 
Christabel,  225. 

Chris  fs  Victory  and  Death,  118. 
Citizen  of  the  World,  192. 
"  Classic  "  poetry,  162. 
Classic  writers,  145-8. 
Classical  allusion,  66. 
Classicism,    142,    144,   149,   150, 

172,  193,  206. 
Clough,  Thomas,  251. 
Coleridge,   Samuel    Taylor,    215, 

216,  226,  227. 
Colet,  Dean,  25. 
Collins,  William,  193. 
Complete    English    Tradesman, 

165. 

Congreve,  W.,  in. 
Conrad,  Joseph,  289. 
Coryat,  Thomas,  34. 
Cosmography,  239. 
Cowley,  Abraham,  124. 
Crashaw,  Richard,  124. 
Criticism,  109. 
art,  216. 
dramatic,  216. 
Cromwelfs  Letters  and  Speeches, 

258. 
Cumberland  Beggar,  237-8. 


307 


308 


ENGLISH  LITERATURE 


Death  of  Blanche  the  Duchess, 

7,  18. 
Decline    and    Fall   of    Roman 

Empire,  188-191. 
Defoe,  Daniel,    146,    163-6,  264, 

265,  267. 

Dekker,  Thomas,  96. 
De  Quincey,  Thomas,  234. 
Devil's  Disciple,  The,  300. 
Dickens,  Charles,  279-280. 
Donne,  John,  119-124,  147,  148. 
Dowson,  Ernest,  297. 
Drama,  the,  71-106,  116. 
decline  of,  99,  266. 
revival  of,  298. 
Dramatic  criticism,  216. 
Dramatic  lyric,  the,  249. 
Dryden,    John,    64,    146,    153-6, 

162-3,  20°- 
Duchess  of  Malfi,  98. 
Dunbar,  William,  17. 

Earle,  John,  263. 
Eastward  Ho  !  96. 
Edward  //.,  86. 
Eliot,  George,  282. 
Elizabethan  dramatists,  80. 
Elizabethan  prose,  59-70. 
Elizabethan  poetry,  35-59. 
English  prose  beginnings,  24-5. 
Erasmus,  26. 
Essay  on  Criticism,  158. 
Essay  on  Man,  157. 
Essays  of  Elia,  233. 
Euphues,  64-7,  261-2. 
Evelyn,  John,  no. 
Everyman,  75. 

Faerie  Queen,  55-7,  115,  117, 135. 
"  Fantastics,"  the,  124. 
Fielding,  Henry,  271-3. 
Fitzgerald,  Edward,  294. 
Fletcher,  Giles,  118. 
Fletcher,   Phineas,  99,  100,  113, 

117. 

Ford,  John,  101. 
Fox,  George,  no. 
French  Naturalist  school,  284-5. 
French  Revolution,  254,  257-8. 
Fuller,  Thomas,  1 10. 

Gaskell,  Mrs,  282. 
Gibbon,  Edward,  186-191. 


Gissing,  George,  288. 
Goldsmith,  Oliver,  191-2,  274. 
Gorboduc,  79. 
Gower,  John,  4,  8,  13,  14. 
Gray,  Thomas,  193. 
Greene,  Robert,  81. 
Gulliver's  Travels,  167-8. 

Haddon,  Walter,  28. 
Hakluyt,  Richard,  61. 
Hamlet,  83,  93,  94,  95. 
Hardy,  Thomas,  283. 
Harrison,  Roger,  33,  61. 
Harvey,  Gabriel,  53. 
Hawes,  Stephen,  15. 
Hazlitt,  William,  217,  234. 
Henry  VII.,  The  Reign  of,  130. 
Henryson,  Robert,  16. 
Herbert,  George,  112,  124. 
Herrick,  Robert,  125. 
Heywood,  John,  78. 
Hind  and  the  Panther,  The,  155. 
Historical  novel,  277-8. 
Historical  sense,  213-4. 
Hobbes,  Thomas,  62. 
Holinshed,  Thomas,  61. 
Homer  (Pope's),  152. 
Hooker,  Richard,  63. 
House  of  Fame,  The,  7. 
Hymn-writing,  116. 

Ibsen,  Henrik,  299. 

Idylls  of  the  King,  242,  245. 

Induction    to    the    Mirror  for 

Magistrates,  45,  46. 
In  Memoriam,  244. 
Irish  drama,  302. 
Italy,  influence  of,  33-4. 

James  the  First  of  Scotland,  15, 1 6. 

Johnson,  Lionel,  297. 

Johnson,   Samuel,   172-181,  208, 

217. 

Johnson,  BoswelPs  Life  of,  176. 
Johnsoris  Dictionary,  173. 
Jonson,  Ben,  37,  101-6,  119,  120, 

135- 

Journal  of  the  Plague  Year,  265. 
Journey  to  the  Western  Hebrides, 

174. 

Keats,  John,  58,  215,  216,  228-9. 
King  Lear,  83,  94. 


INDEX 


309 


King's  Quair,  15. 
Kipling,  Rudyard,  289,  295. 
Kirke,  Edward,  53,  54. 
Kubla  Khan,  225. 
Kyd,  Thomas,  81,  82,  94. 

Labiche,  299. 

Lamb,  Charles,  217,  232-4. 

Langland,  William,  3,  13. 

Latinism,  30-2. 

Latter  Day  Pamphlets,  255. 

Legend  of  Good  Women,  7. 

Linacre,  Thomas,  25. 

Lines  above  Tintern  Abbey,  210, 

223. 

Lives  of  the  Novelists,  216. 
Lives  of  the  Poets,  174. 
Locke,  John,  62. 
Lodge,  Thomas,  37,  61. 
Lycidas,  137. 
Lydgate,  John,  15. 
Lyly,  John,  64-7. 
Lyric,  the,  47-8,  115. 
Lyric  poetry,  125. 
Lyrical  Ballads,  207,  220-2. 

Macaulay,  Lord,  254. 
Macbeth,  83,  94. 
Macpherson,  William,  210. 
Marlowe,  Christopher,  81,  83,  86, 

87,  94. 

Marston,  John,  95. 
Masefield,  John,  296. 
Massinger,  Philip,  101. 
Maud,  244. 

Memoirs  of  a  Cavalier,  265. 
Men  and  Women,  247. 
Merchant  of  Venice,  92. 
Meredith,  George,  252,  283. 
Metaphysical  poets,  124. 
Microcosmography,  263. 
Middleton,  96. 
Milton,  John,  32,  55,  58,  112,  134, 

161. 

Moore,  George,  285. 
Morality  plays,  75. 
More,  Sir  Thomas,  26,  27. 
Mrs  Warreris  Profession,  300. 
Mummers  Wife,  286. 
Mystery  of  Edwin  Drood,  280. 

Nash,  Thomas,  61. 

New  Arabian  Nights,  289. 


New  Atlantis,  26,  131. 
Novel,  the,  260-291. 

Occleve,  Thomas,  15. 

Othello,  94. 

Oxford  Movement,  240. 

Palace  of  Pleasure,  261. 
Pandosto,  the  Triumph  of  Time, 

81. 

Paradise  Lost,  115,  140,  141. 
Parliament  of  Fowls,  The,  7. 
Past  and  Present,  255. 
Pastoral  romance,  68,  69. 
Peele,  George,  81. 
Pepys,  Samuel,  no. 
Percy,  Bishop,  211. 
Periodical  essay,  the,  169,  263. 
Pickwick  Papers,  12,  282. 
Pilgrim's  Progress,  264. 
Pippa  Passes,  237,  238. 
Platonism,  26. 
Playboy  of  the  Western    World, 

3°4- 

Pope,  Alexander,  156-160,  206. 
Prelude,  The,  219,  220,  222. 
Princess,  The,  242-4. 
Prose  writers,  163. 
Purchas,  61. 

Puritanism,  97,  in,  113. 
Purple  Island,  The,  113,  117. 

Raleigh,  Sir  Walter,  37,  38. 

Rambler,  the,  177. 

Rape  of  Lucrece,  78. 

Rape  of  the  Lock,  158,  159,  160. 

Rasselas,  174. 

Realist  school,  284,  285. 

Religio  Laid,  155. 

Religio  Medici,  133. 

Religious  drama,  71-4. 

Reliques  of  Ancient  Poetry,  211. 

Renaissance,  the,  25,  134. 

poets,  55. 

writers,  108. 

Resolution  and  Independence,*"!?.. 
Reynolds,  Sir  Joshua,  174. 
Rhetoric,  148. 
Rhyme,  91. 

Richardson,  267-271,  273,  276. 
Riders  to  the  Sea,  304. 
Ring  and  the  Book,  248,  250. 


310 


ENGLISH   LITERATURE 


Robinson  Crusoe,  165. 
Roderick  Random,  275. 
Romance  of  the  Rose,  6,  16. 
Romantic  criticism,  216. 

poetry,  204-231. 

prose,  231-234. 

revival,  204-234. 
Romanticism,     142-4,    149,    193, 

200,  236,  238. 
Rossetti,  D.  G.,  240,  252. 
Rowley  Poems,  211. 
Royal  Society,  145. 
Rubdiydt  of  Omar  Khayyam,  294. 
Ruskin,  John,  254. 

Sartor  Resartus,  254,  258. 
Sackville,  Thomas,  45,  46. 
Sardou,  Victorien,  299. 
Satirists,  the,  1 59. 
Schoolmaster,  28,  33. 
Scientific  spirit,  240. 
Scott,  Sir  Walter,  211,  214,  215, 

216,  277,  278. 
Scottish  poets,  15-19. 
Seasons,  The,  162. 
Shakespeare,  32,  88-101, 151. 
Shaw,  G.  B.,  300,  301. 
Shelley,  215,  216,  226-8. 
Shepherds  Calendar,  54. 
Sheridan,  Mark,  299. 
Shirley,  101. 
"  Short  story,"  the,  290. 
Sidney,    Sir    Philip,   37,  48,  49, 

68-70,  107,  114,  122,  135. 
Sir  Charles  Grandison,  271. 
Skelton,  15. 
Smollett,  274. 
Sonnet,  the,  115,  H 6. 
Sonneteers,  the,  123,  151. 
Sordello,  122. 

Spanish  Tragedy,  The,  82,  94,  95. 
Spectator,  the,  169,  170,  171. 
Spenser,  Edmund,  3,  15,  32,  52-9, 

107,  in,  114,  117,  n8,  119, 

160,  161. 

Steele,  Richard,  169-171,  263. 
Sterne,  Laurence,  288,  275,  276. 
Stevenson,  R.  L., 
Strolling  players,  76. 
Supernatural,  the,  214,  224. 
Surrey,  Earl  of,  15,39,41-4. 


Swift,  Jonathan,  146,  166-9. 
Swinburne,  252,  294. 
Synge,  J.  M.,  303-5. 

Tale  oj  a  Tub,  168. 
Tamburlaine,  84,  85. 
Tatler,  the,  169,  170. 
Tennyson,  Alfred  Lord,  240-7. 
Testament  of '  Cressyd,  The,  16,  17. 
Thackeray,  W.  M.,  279,  281. 
Theatre,  Elizabethan,  77. 
Thistle  and  the  Rose,  18. 
Thomson,  James,  161,  162. 
Thoughts  on  Various  Subjects,  169. 
TotteT s  Miscellany,  39,  40. 
Tristram  Shandy,  275. 
Troilus  and  Cressida,  16,  32. 
Two  Married  Women  and  the 
Widow,  1 8. 

Udall,  Nicholas,  28. 
Unities,  the,  102. 
Utopia,  26,  27. 

Vanity  Fair,  279. 
Vaughan,  Richard,  124. 
Venus  and  Adonis,  112. 
Vergil  (Dry den's),  152. 
Vicar  of  Wakefield,  274. 
Victorian  Age,  the,  235-259. 
View  of  the  State  of  Ireland,  52. 

Waller,  Edmund,  125. 
Walpole,  Horace,  209. 
Watson,  William,  296. 
Webster,  John,  98. 
Well  of  the  Saints,  The,  304. 
Wells,  H.  G.,29o. 
White  Devil,  The,  98. 
Widowers'  Houses,  300. 
Wife  of  Bath,  18. 
Wilde,  Oscar,  53,  301. 
Wilson,  Sir  Thomas,  28,  31. 
Winter's  Tale,  8 1. 
Wither,  George,  118. 
Wordsworth,  William,   208,  210, 

215,  216,  218-224,  226. 
Wyatt,   Sir  Thomas,  15,  39,  40, 

41,  42. 

Yeats,  W.  B.,  58,  297. 


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